Drop-Upcycling: Training Sparse Mixture of Experts with Partial
  Re-initialization
Authors: name: Taishi Nakamura; name: Takuya Akiba; name: Kazuki Fujii; name: Yusuke Oda; name: Rio Yokota; name: Jun Suzuki
Published: 2025-02-26 16:06:36

Abstract: The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture reduces the training and inference
cost significantly compared to a dense model of equivalent capacity. Upcycling
is an approach that initializes and trains an MoE model using a pre-trained
dense model. While upcycling leads to initial performance gains, the training
progresses slower than when trained from scratch, leading to suboptimal
performance in the long term. We propose Drop-Upcycling - a method that
effectively addresses this problem. Drop-Upcycling combines two seemingly
contradictory approaches: utilizing the knowledge of pre-trained dense models
while statistically re-initializing some parts of the weights. This approach
strategically promotes expert specialization, significantly enhancing the MoE
model's efficiency in knowledge acquisition. Extensive large-scale experiments
demonstrate that Drop-Upcycling significantly outperforms previous MoE
construction methods in the long term, specifically when training on hundreds
of billions of tokens or more. As a result, our MoE model with 5.9B active
parameters achieves comparable performance to a 13B dense model in the same
model family, while requiring approximately 1/4 of the training FLOPs. All
experimental resources, including source code, training data, model checkpoints
and logs, are publicly available to promote reproducibility and future research
on MoE.