Approximation Rates and VC-Dimension Bounds for (P)ReLU MLP Mixture of Experts

TMLR Paper3405 Authors

28 Sept 2024 (modified: 28 Nov 2024)Under review for TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) can scale up beyond traditional deep learning models by employing a routing strategy in which each input is processed by a single ``expert'' deep learning model. This strategy allows us to scale up the number of parameters defining the MoE while maintaining sparse activation, i.e., MoEs only load a small number of their total parameters into GPU VRAM for the forward pass depending on the input. In this paper, we provide an approximation and learning-theoretic analysis of mixtures of expert MLPs with (P)ReLU activation functions. We first prove that for every error level $\varepsilon>0$ and every Lipschitz function $f:[0,1]^n\to \mathbb{R}$, one can construct a MoMLP model (a Mixture-of-Experts comprising of (P)ReLU MLPs) which uniformly approximates $f$ to $\varepsilon$ accuracy over $[0,1]^n$, while only requiring networks of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ parameters to be loaded in memory. Additionally, we show that MoMLPs can generalize since the entire MoMLP model has a (finite) VC dimension of $\tilde{O}(L\max\{nL,JW\})$, if there are $L$ experts and each expert has a depth and width of $J$ and $W$, respectively.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Jean_Barbier2
Submission Number: 3405
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