# Assembly of Experts: Linear-time construction of the Chimera LLM variants with emergent and adaptable behaviors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [TIES-Merging: Resolving Interference When Merging Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01708/) (2023)
- [Language Models are Super Mario: Absorbing Abilities from Homologous Models as a Free Lunch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03099/) (2023)
- [Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21187/) (2024)
- [BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15877/) (2024)
- [Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16419/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-Prover-V2: Advancing Formal Mathematical Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Subgoal Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21801/) (2025)
- [Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18547/) (2024)
- [Training Language Models to Reason Efficiently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04463/) (2025)
- [Model Fusion via Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05653/) (2019)
- [Evolutionary Optimization of Model Merging Recipes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13187/) (2024)
- [Model Breadcrumbs: Scaling Multi-Task Model Merging with Sparse Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06795/) (2023)
- [C3oT: Generating Shorter Chain-of-Thought without Compromising Effectiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11664/) (2024)
- [Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding for Efficient LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19324/) (2025)
- [Deep Model Fusion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15698/) (2023)
- [Can Language Models Learn to Skip Steps?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01855/) (2024)
- [Command A: An Enterprise-Ready Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00698/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Efficient Long-to-Short LLM Reasoning with Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20641/) (2025)
- [Transformer Fusion with Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05719/) (2023)
- [Unconstrained Model Merging for Enhanced LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13699/) (2024)
- [Merge to Mix: Mixing Datasets via Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16066/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11340/) (2026)
- [IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18098/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models on Floating-Point Error Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31308/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Requiring 1013-1015 FLOPs to calculate one 8 bit weight in an LLM during pretraining is extremely expensive and seems inefficient. To better leverage the huge investments made into pretrained models, we develop the new "Assembly-of-Experts" (AoE) construction method to create capable child variants of existing Mixture-of-Experts parent models in linear time. Model weight tensors get interpolated individually, allowing to enhance or suppress semantic features of the parents. Varying the proportion of weights taken from the parent models, we observe some properties of the AoE child model changing gradually, while other behavioral traits emerge with a sharp transition. Surprisingly, nearly every generated model is functional and capable, which makes searching the model space straightforward. We construct the DeepSeek R1T "Chimera", a 671B open-weights hybrid model combining DeepSeek's V3-0324 and R1 model variants. The child inherits only the routed expert tensors of R1, but still achieves about R1-level intelligence. At the same time, it uses about 40% fewer output tokens, close to V3 speed. Constructed without any fine-tuning or distillation, the Chimera exhibits surprisingly compact, orderly reasoning compared to its parent models.