# MPipeMoE: Memory Efficient MoE for Pre-trained Models with Adaptive Pipeline Parallelism

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22175 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22175/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 26 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2025.

## 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, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04473/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05596/) (2022)
- [BASE Layers: Simplifying Training of Large, Sparse Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16716/) (2021)
- [On the Optimization of Deep Networks: Implicit Acceleration by Overparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06509/) (2018)
- [Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03382/) (2022)
- [Mesh-TensorFlow: Deep Learning for Supercomputers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02084/) (2018)
- [PipeDream: Fast and Efficient Pipeline Parallel DNN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03377/) (2018)
- [Scalable and Efficient MoE Training for Multitask Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10465/) (2021)
- [Toward Efficient Language Model Pretraining and Downstream Adaptation via Self-Evolution: A Case Study on SuperGLUE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01853/) (2022)
- [Gating Dropout: Communication-efficient Regularization for Sparsely Activated Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14336/) (2022)
- [E2S2: Encoding-Enhanced Sequence-to-Sequence Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14912/) (2022)
- [AxoNN: An asynchronous, message-driven parallel framework for extreme-scale deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13005/) (2021)
- [Buddy Compression: Enabling Larger Memory for Deep Learning and HPC Workloads on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02596/) (2019)
- [BLISS: Robust Sequence-to-Sequence Learning via Self-Supervised Input Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07837/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Fine-grained Computation-Communication Overlap via Tile-level Signaling and Scheduling for Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19539/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become one of the most popular techniques to scale pre-trained models to extraordinarily large sizes. Dynamic activation of experts allows for conditional computation, increasing the number of parameters of neural networks, which is critical for absorbing the vast amounts of knowledge available in many deep learning areas. However, despite the existing system and algorithm optimizations, there are significant challenges to be tackled when it comes to the inefficiencies of communication and memory consumption. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of MPipeMoE, a high-performance library that accelerates MoE training with adaptive and memory-efficient pipeline parallelism. Inspired by that the MoE training procedure can be divided into multiple independent sub-stages, we design adaptive pipeline parallelism with an online algorithm to configure the granularity of the pipelining. Further, we analyze the memory footprint breakdown of MoE training and identify that activations and temporary buffers are the primary contributors to the overall memory footprint. Toward memory efficiency, we propose memory reusing strategies to reduce memory requirements by eliminating memory redundancies, and develop an adaptive selection component to determine the optimal strategy that considers both hardware capacities and model characteristics at runtime. We implement MPipeMoE upon PyTorch and evaluate it with common MoE models in a physical cluster consisting of 8 NVIDIA DGX A100 servers. Compared with the state-of-art approach, MPipeMoE achieves up to 2.8x speedup and reduces memory footprint by up to 47% in training large models.