# MoE++: Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Methods with Zero-Computation Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07348/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Efficient MoE training and inference systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 51 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Efficient MoE training and inference systems](https://mlsanity.com/moe/efficient-moe-training-and-inference-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [LongCat-Flash Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01322/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Inference Optimization Techniques for Mixture of Experts Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14219/) (2024)
- [MoH: Multi-Head Attention as Mixture-of-Head Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11842/) (2024)
- [I2MoE: Interpretable Multimodal Interaction-aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19190/) (2025)
- [Introducing LongCat-Flash-Thinking: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18883/) (2025)
- [Mixture of Lookup Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15798/) (2025)
- [Elastic MoE: Unlocking the Inference-Time Scalability of Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21892/) (2025)
- [MoDES: Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models via Dynamic Expert Skipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15690/) (2025)
- [MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15281/) (2025)
- [Grove MoE: Towards Efficient and Superior MoE LLMs with Adjugate Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07785/) (2025)
- [Kairos: Toward Adaptive and Parameter-Efficient Time Series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25826/) (2025)
- [MoE Pathfinder: Trajectory-driven Expert Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18425/) (2025)
- [LIBMoE: A Library for comprehensive benchmarking Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00918/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Mixture-of-Experts with Nadaraya-Watson Kernel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25913/) (2025)
- [Route Experts by Sequence, not by Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06494/) (2025)
- [Grouter: Decoupling Routing from Representation for Accelerated MoE Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06626/) (2026)
- [Post-Trained MoE Can Skip Half Experts via Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18643/) (2026)
- [A Review of DeepSeek Models' Key Innovative Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11486/) (2025)
- [Breaking the MoE LLM Trilemma: Dynamic Expert Clustering with Structured Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02345/) (2025)
- [DTop-p MoE: Sparsity-Controlled Dynamic Top-p MoE for Foundation Model Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13996/) (2025)
- [ConceptMoE: Adaptive Token-to-Concept Compression for Implicit Compute Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21420/) (2026)
- [SERE: Similarity-based Expert Re-routing for Efficient Batch Decoding in MoE Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07616/) (2026)
- [Expert Threshold Routing for Autoregressive Language Modeling with Dynamic Computation Allocation and Load Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11535/) (2026)
- [Ban&Pick: Enhancing Performance and Efficiency of MoE-LLMs via Smarter Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06346/) (2025)
- [FURINA: Free from Unmergeable Router via LINear Aggregation of mixed experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14900/) (2025)
- [REN: Anatomically-Informed Mixture-of-Experts for Interstitial Lung Disease Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04923/) (2025)
- [Certain Head, Uncertain Tail: Expert-Sample for Test-Time Scaling in Fine-Grained MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02443/) (2026)
- [DSMoE: Matrix-Partitioned Experts with Dynamic Routing for Computation-Efficient Dense LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12455/) (2025)
- [VersatileFFN: Achieving Parameter Efficiency in LLMs via Adaptive Wide-and-Deep Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14531/) (2025)
- [Improving MoE Compute Efficiency by Composing Weight and Data Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15370/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we aim to simultaneously enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods. To achieve this, we propose MoE++, a general and heterogeneous MoE framework that integrates both Feed-Forward Network~(FFN) and zero-computation experts. Specifically, we introduce three types of zero-computation experts: the zero expert, copy expert, and constant expert, which correspond to discard, skip, and replace operations, respectively. This design offers three key advantages: (i) Low Computing Overhead: Unlike the uniform mixing mechanism for all tokens within vanilla MoE, MoE++ allows each token to engage with a dynamic number of FFNs, be adjusted by constant vectors, or even skip the MoE layer entirely. (ii) High Performance: By enabling simple tokens to utilize fewer FFN experts, MoE++ allows more experts to focus on challenging tokens, thereby unlocking greater performance potential than vanilla MoE. (iii) Deployment Friendly: Given that zero-computation experts have negligible parameters, we can deploy all zero-computation experts on each GPU, eliminating the significant communication overhead and expert load imbalance associated with FFN experts distributed across different GPUs. Moreover, we leverage gating residuals, enabling each token to consider the pathway taken in the previous layer when selecting the appropriate experts. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MoE++ achieves better performance while delivering 1.1-2.1x expert forward throughput compared to a vanilla MoE model of the same size, which lays a solid foundation for developing advanced and efficient MoE-related models.