# MoE-ViE: Mixture of Experts Vision Encoder for Efficient Image and Video Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 73 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)
- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)

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

- [Why Is Video Still So Expensive? A Survey of Inference-Efficiency Mechanisms in Video and Audiovisual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10355/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision encoders are a critical component of vision-language models, and scaling their capacity effectively improves performance. However, dense scaling increases compute cost and inference latency. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a compelling alternative, having enabled efficient scaling in LLMs, yet the MoE design space for CLIP-style vision encoders remains underexplored at State-of-the-Art (SOTA) levels. In this work, we systematically study MoE designs for vision encoder scaling and find that fine-grained MoE topologies yield substantial gains over both dense and standard MoE counterparts. We further propose an auxiliary-loss-free balancing variant for better expert utilization, and design a specialized MoE kernel to mitigate inference latency overhead. To enhance video capabilities while preserving image knowledge, we introduce frame-level distillation paired with a novel freezing mechanism. We pretrain a series of Mixture-of-Experts Vision Encoders (MoE-ViE) across a range of sizes, all consistently outperforming their dense counterparts. Our largest model matches the zero-shot performance of a SOTA encoder 1.7x its size at 76% of its latency. When aligned with an LLM, MoE-ViE surpasses all compared encoders on image and video benchmarks, including those with up to 5x more activated parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/moe_vie.