Union of Experts: Adapting Hierarchical Routing to Equivalently
  Decomposed Transformer
Authors: name: Yujiao Yang; name: Jing Lian; name: Linhui Li
Published: 2025-03-04 11:01:25

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enhances model performance while maintaining
computational efficiency, making it well-suited for large-scale applications.
However, expert in exist MoE paradigm works as an individual, thereby lacking
high-quality expert interactions. Moreover, they have not been effectively
extended to attention block, which constrains further efficiency improvements.
To tackle these issues, we propose Union-of-Experts (UoE), which decomposes
transformer into an equitant group of experts, and then implement dynamic
routing on input data and experts. Our approach advances MoE design with three
key innovations: (1) We conducted equitant expert decomposition on both MLP
blocks and attention blocks based on matrix partition in tensor parallelism.
(2) We developed two routing paradigms: patch wise data selection and expert
selection, to apply routing across different levels. (3) We design the
architecture of UoE model, including Selective Multi-Head Attention (SMHA) and
Union-of-MLP-Experts (UoME). (4) We develop parallel implementation of UoE's
routing and computation operation, and optimize efficiency based on the
hardware processing analysis. The experiments demonstrate that the model
employed with UoE surpass Full Attention, state-of-art MoEs and efficient
transformers in several tasks across image and natural language domains. The
source codes are available at https://github.com/YujiaoYang-work/UoE.