Linear-MoE: Linear Sequence Modeling Meets Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: name: Weigao Sun; name: Disen Lan; name: Tong Zhu; name: Xiaoye Qu; name: Yu Cheng
Published: 2025-03-07 14:17:45

Abstract: Linear Sequence Modeling (LSM) like linear attention, state space models and
linear RNNs, and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have recently emerged as significant
architectural improvements. In this paper, we introduce Linear-MoE, a
production-level system for modeling and training large-scale models that
integrate LSM with MoE. Linear-MoE leverages the advantages of both LSM modules
for linear-complexity sequence modeling and MoE layers for sparsely activation,
aiming to offer high performance with efficient training. The Linear-MoE system
comprises: 1) Modeling subsystem, which provides a unified framework supporting
all instances of LSM. and 2) Training subsystem, which facilitates efficient
training by incorporating various advanced parallelism technologies,
particularly Sequence Parallelism designed for Linear-MoE models. Additionally,
we explore hybrid models that combine Linear-MoE layers with standard
Transformer-MoE layers with its Sequence Parallelism to further enhance model
flexibility and performance. Evaluations on two model series, A0.3B-2B and
A1B-7B, demonstrate Linear-MoE achieves efficiency gains while maintaining
competitive performance on various benchmarks, showcasing its potential as a
next-generation foundational model architecture. Code:
https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.