Mixture of Quantized Experts (MoQE): Complementary Effect of Low-bit Quantization and Robustness

Young Jin Kim, Raffy Fahim, Hany Hassan

Keywords: MoE, Quantization, Mixture of Experts, Sparse Model, Machine Translation

Abstract: Large Mixture of Experts (MoE) models could achieve state-of-the-art quality on various language tasks, including machine translation task, thanks to the efficient model scaling capability with expert parallelism. However, it has brought a fundamental issue of larger memory consumption at deployment time. Furthermore, this results in significant inference speed degradation at auto-regressive decoding steps due to the increased memory transfers. In this paper, we propose a simple weight-only quantization method using ultra low-bit such as 2-bit, 3-bit and 4-bits to effectively mitigate the increased memory and latency issues of MoE models. We show that low-bit quantization together with the MoE architecture delivers a reliable model performance while reducing the memory size significantly even without any additional training. Especially, expert layers in MoE models are much more robust to the quantization than conventional feedforward networks (FFN) layers. In our comprehensive analysis, we show that MoE models with 2-bit and 80\% sparse expert weights can deliver better model performance than the dense model trained on the same dataset. We present how quantization of different parts of models affects the performance with various experiments using a large MoE model (5.3 B). As a result of low-bit quantization, we show the model size can be reduced by 4.9X smaller than the original half precision floating point (fp16) MoE model. This cuts down the model size of 5.3B parameters from 8.4x of the dense model to only 1.7x of the dense model after 2-bit quantization. It still preserves 1.88\% higher accuracy than the dense model. Combined with an optimized GPU runtime implementation, it also achieves 2.7X speed-up which is even slightly faster than the FLOPs equivalent dense model.

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TL;DR: We investigate robustness of MoE experts, and apply ultra low-bit quantization to them for achieving more efficient MoE model inference.