Elastic MoE: Unlocking the Inference-Time Scalability of Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models typically fix the number of activated experts $k$ at both training and inference. Intuitively, activating more experts at inference $k'$ (where $k'> k$) means engaging a larger set of model parameters for the computation and thus is expected to improve performance. However, contrary to this intuition, we find the scaling range to be so narrow that performance begins to degrade rapidly after only a slight increase in the number of experts. Further investigation reveals that this degradation stems from a lack of learned collaboration among experts. To address this, we introduce Elastic Mixture-of-Experts (EMoE), a novel training framework that enables MoE models to scale the number of activated experts at inference without incurring additional training overhead. By simultaneously training experts to collaborate in diverse combinations and encouraging the router for high-quality selections, EMoE ensures robust performance across computational budgets at inference. We conduct extensive experiments on various MoE settings. Our results show that EMoE significantly expands the effective performance-scaling range, extending it to as much as 2-3$\times$ the training-time $k$, while also pushing the model's peak performance to a higher level.