Smoothing the Top-k Exposure Boundary for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models scale parameter capacity efficiently while maintaining a fixed compute budget per token. However, traditional training paradigms enforce a static choice of top-$k$ experts, which converts a continuous routing distribution into a rigid step function. This constraint introduces a brittle boundary where highly competitive experts are arbitrarily separated into full-supervision and zero-feedback zones based on minor score fluctuations. To address this issue, we propose Elastic Expert Routing, which stochastically samples the active expert budget from a localized discrete distribution centered at $k$. Over multiple training iterations, this mechanism softens the sharp threshold into a gradual probability distribution. Because the sampling neighborhood remains symmetric, this approach matches the expected computational cost of deterministic training, while preserving the inference budget. During supervised fine-tuning, elastic routing improves downstream macro-averages on OLMoE-1B-7B and Qwen3-30B-A3B by $+0.84$ and $+2.02$ points, respectively. In addition, in from-scratch pretraining, it reduces validation LM loss by up to $0.04$ and outperforms the static top-$k$ baseline by $1.6$ points on average across downstream tasks. Comparisons on Qwen3 fine-tuning and from-scratch pretraining further show higher average scores than Noisy top-$k$, expert FFN dropout, and DefaultMoE.