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AIMER pruned MoE experts without a calibration set and scored all experts in under two seconds

AspireAI community · arXiv
Mixture-of-Experts models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token compute, but deployment still has to store the whole expert pool. Most task-agnostic expert-pruning methods estimate importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, which makes the pruning decision sensitive to which calibration data you picked and adds preprocessing cost. AIMER scores experts by the absolute mean over root-mean-square of expert weights, a calibration-free criterion that captures how concentrated each expert's weights are. Across 7B to 47B MoE models with distinct architectures and 16 benchmarks, AIMER gave a stronger capability balance across tasks than other calibration-free methods, and also beat calibration-based baselines calibrated on the widely used C4 corpus. Scoring every expert took 0.22 to 2.06 seconds. The limitation is that the paper reports balance and capability rather than measured inference speedups, so the serving win is implied by the pruning, not directly benchmarked.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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