MoE-I$^2$: Compressing Mixture of Experts Models through Inter-Expert Pruning and Intra-Expert Low-Rank Decomposition

Abstract: The emergence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs has significantly advanced the development of LLMs. Compared to traditional LLMs, MoE LLMs outperform traditional LLMs by achieving higher performance with considerably fewer activated parameters. Despite this efficiency, their enormous parameter size still leads to high deployment costs. In this paper, we introduce a two-stage compression method tailored for MoE to reduce the model size and decrease the computational cost. First, in the inter-expert pruning stage, we analyze the importance of each layer and propose the Layer-wise Genetic Search and Block-wise KT-Reception Field with the non-uniform pruning ratio to prune the individual expert. Second, in the intra-expert decomposition stage, we apply the low-rank decomposition to further compress the parameters within the remaining experts. Extensive experiments on Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite, and Mixtral-8$\times$7B demonstrate that our proposed methods can both reduce the model size and enhance inference efficiency while maintaining performance in various zero-shot tasks. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/xiaochengsky/MoEI-2.git}