Not All Models Suit Expert Offloading: On Local Routing Consistency of
  Mixture-of-Expert Models
Authors: name: Jingcong Liang; name: Siyuan Wang; name: Miren Tian; name: Yitong Li; name: Duyu Tang; name: Zhongyu Wei
Published: 2025-05-21 22:13:09

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient scaling of large language models
(LLMs) with sparsely activated experts during inference. To effectively deploy
large MoE models on memory-constrained devices, many systems introduce *expert
offloading* that caches a subset of experts in fast memory, leaving others on
slow memory to run on CPU or load on demand. While some research has exploited
the locality of expert activations, where consecutive tokens activate similar
experts, the degree of this **local routing consistency** varies across models
and remains understudied. In this paper, we propose two metrics to measure
local routing consistency of MoE models: (1) **Segment Routing Best Performance
(SRP)**, which evaluates how well a fixed group of experts can cover the needs
of a segment of tokens, and (2) **Segment Cache Best Hit Rate (SCH)**, which
measures the optimal segment-level cache hit rate under a given cache size
limit. We analyzed 20 MoE LLMs with diverse sizes and architectures and found
that models that apply MoE on every layer and do not use shared experts exhibit
the highest local routing consistency. We further showed that
domain-specialized experts contribute more to routing consistency than
vocabulary-specialized ones, and that most models can balance between cache
effectiveness and efficiency with cache sizes approximately 2x the active
experts. These findings pave the way for memory-efficient MoE design and
deployment without compromising inference speed. We publish the code for
replicating experiments at https://github.com/ljcleo/moe-lrc .