UniPool: A Globally Shared Expert Pool for Mixture-of-Experts

TL;DR

UniPool introduces a shared expert pool architecture for Mixture-of-Experts models, reducing parameters and improving performance by treating expert capacity as a global resource rather than per-layer.

Contribution

This work proposes UniPool, a novel shared expert pool design with auxiliary loss and NormRouter, enabling more efficient and scalable MoE models with sublinear expert growth.

Findings

UniPool consistently improves validation loss and perplexity across multiple model scales.

Reduced-pool UniPool variants match or outperform layer-wise MoE with only 41.6%-66.7% of expert parameters.

Expert parameters can grow sublinearly with depth while maintaining or improving model performance.

Abstract

Modern Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures allocate expert capacity through a rigid per-layer rule: each transformer layer owns a separate expert set. This convention couples depth scaling with linear expert-parameter growth and assumes that every layer needs isolated expert capacity. However, recent analyses and our routing probe challenge this allocation rule: replacing a deeper layer's learned top-k router with uniform random routing drops downstream accuracy by only 1.0-1.6 points across multiple production MoE models. Motivated by this redundancy, we propose UniPool, an MoE architecture that treats expert capacity as a global architectural budget by replacing per-layer expert ownership with a single shared pool accessed by independent per-layer routers. To enable stable and balanced training under sharing, we introduce a pool-level auxiliary loss that balances expert utilization across the entire pool, and adopt NormRouter to provide sparse and scale-stable routing into the shared expert pool. Across five LLaMA-architecture model scales (182M, 469M, 650M, 830M, and 978M parameters) trained on 30B tokens from the Pile, UniPool consistently improves validation loss and perplexity over the matched vanilla MoE baselines. Across these scales, UniPool reduces validation loss by up to 0.0386 relative to vanilla MoE. Beyond raw loss improvement, our results identify pool size as an explicit depth-scaling hyperparameter: reduced-pool UniPool variants using only 41.6%-66.7% of the vanilla expert-parameter budget match or outperform layer-wise MoE at the tested scales. This shows that, under a shared-pool design, expert parameters need not grow linearly with depth; they can grow sublinearly while remaining more efficient and effective than vanilla MoE. Further analysis shows that UniPool's benefits compose with finer-grained expert decomposition.