orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

moe-training

Train Mixture of Experts (MoE) models using DeepSpeed or HuggingFace.

Quelltext ansehen

Verwendung

  1. Installationsbefehl kopieren und das Quellpaket vor der Installation in der eigenen Agentenumgebung prüfen.
  2. Benötigte Werkzeuge, Zugangsdaten und Hosts im Original prüfen.
  3. Eingabe und gewünschtes Ergebnis beschreiben und die Ausgabe mit den Quellen abgleichen.
npx skills add https://github.com/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills --skill moe-training

Vor dem Start

  • Die Installation umfasst weder Modellabo noch API-Kontingent oder Dateizugriffsrechte.
  • Sterne und Installationen zeigen Aktivität, keine unabhängige Qualitäts- oder Sicherheitsprüfung.
Originales Skill-Dokument

Aus dem Quell-Repository gerendert; Überschriften, Beispiele, Code, Tabellen, Links und Bilder bleiben erhalten.

MoE Training: Mixture of Experts

When to Use This Skill

Use MoE Training when you need to:

  • Train larger models with limited compute (5× cost reduction vs dense models)
  • Scale model capacity without proportional compute increase
  • Achieve better performance per compute budget than dense models
  • Specialize experts for different domains/tasks/languages
  • Reduce inference latency with sparse activation (only 13B/47B params active in Mixtral)
  • Implement SOTA models like Mixtral 8x7B, DeepSeek-V3, Switch Transformers

Notable MoE Models: Mixtral 8x7B (Mistral AI), DeepSeek-V3, Switch Transformers (Google), GLaM (Google), NLLB-MoE (Meta)

Installation

bash
# DeepSpeed with MoE support
pip install deepspeed>=0.6.0

# Megatron-DeepSpeed for large-scale training
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/Megatron-DeepSpeed
cd Megatron-DeepSpeed
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Alternative: HuggingFace Transformers
pip install transformers accelerate

Quick Start

Basic MoE Architecture

python
import torch
import torch.nn as nn

class MoELayer(nn.Module):
    """Sparse Mixture of Experts layer."""

    def __init__(self, hidden_size, num_experts=8, top_k=2):
        super().__init__()
        self.num_experts = num_experts
        self.top_k = top_k

        # Expert networks (FFN)
        self.experts = nn.ModuleList([
            nn.Sequential(
                nn.Linear(hidden_size, 4 * hidden_size),
                nn.GELU(),
                nn.Linear(4 * hidden_size, hidden_size)
            )
            for _ in range(num_experts)
        ])

        # Gating network (router)
        self.gate = nn.Linear(hidden_size, num_experts)

    def forward(self, x):
        # x shape: (batch_size, seq_len, hidden_size)
        batch_size, seq_len, hidden_size = x.shape

        # Flatten for routing
        x_flat = x.view(-1, hidden_size)  # (batch_size * seq_len, hidden_size)

        # Compute gate scores
        gate_logits = self.gate(x_flat)  # (batch_size * seq_len, num_experts)

        # Top-k routing
        gate_scores = torch.softmax(gate_logits, dim=-1)
        topk_scores, topk_indices = torch.topk(gate_scores, self.top_k, dim=-1)

        # Normalize top-k scores
        topk_scores = topk_scores / topk_scores.sum(dim=-1, keepdim=True)

        # Dispatch and combine expert outputs
        output = torch.zeros_like(x_flat)

        for i in range(self.top_k):
            expert_idx = topk_indices[:, i]
            expert_scores = topk_scores[:, i].unsqueeze(-1)

            # Route tokens to experts
            for expert_id in range(self.num_experts):
                mask = (expert_idx == expert_id)
                if mask.any():
                    expert_input = x_flat[mask]
                    expert_output = self.experts[expert_id](expert_input)
                    output[mask] += expert_scores[mask] * expert_output

        # Reshape back
        return output.view(batch_size, seq_len, hidden_size)

DeepSpeed MoE Training

bash
# Training script with MoE
deepspeed pretrain_gpt_moe.py \
  --num-layers 24 \
  --hidden-size 1024 \
  --num-attention-heads 16 \
  --seq-length 2048 \
  --max-position-embeddings 2048 \
  --micro-batch-size 4 \
  --global-batch-size 256 \
  --train-iters 500000 \
  --lr 0.0001 \
  --min-lr 0.00001 \
  --lr-decay-style cosine \
  --num-experts 128 \
  --moe-expert-parallel-size 4 \
  --moe-loss-coeff 0.01 \
  --moe-train-capacity-factor 1.25 \
  --moe-eval-capacity-factor 2.0 \
  --fp16 \
  --deepspeed_config ds_config.json

Core Concepts

1. MoE Architecture

Key Components:

  • Experts: Multiple specialized FFN networks (typically 8-128)
  • Router/Gate: Learned network that selects which experts to use
  • Top-k Routing: Activate only k experts per token (k=1 or k=2)
  • Load Balancing: Ensure even expert utilization
Input Token
    ↓
Router (Gate Network)
    ↓
Top-k Expert Selection (e.g., 2 out of 8)
    ↓
Expert 1 (weight: 0.6) + Expert 5 (weight: 0.4)
    ↓
Weighted Combination
    ↓
Output

2. Routing Mechanisms

Top-1 Routing (Switch Transformer):

python
# Simplest routing: one expert per token
gate_logits = router(x)  # (batch, seq_len, num_experts)
expert_idx = torch.argmax(gate_logits, dim=-1)  # Hard routing

Top-2 Routing (Mixtral):

python
# Top-2: two experts per token
gate_scores = torch.softmax(router(x), dim=-1)
top2_scores, top2_indices = torch.topk(gate_scores, k=2, dim=-1)

# Normalize scores
top2_scores = top2_scores / top2_scores.sum(dim=-1, keepdim=True)

# Combine expert outputs
output = (top2_scores[:, :, 0:1] * expert_outputs[top2_indices[:, :, 0]] +
          top2_scores[:, :, 1:2] * expert_outputs[top2_indices[:, :, 1]])

Expert Choice Routing:

python
# Experts choose top-k tokens (instead of tokens choosing experts)
# Guarantees perfect load balancing
expert_scores = router(x).transpose(-1, -2)  # (batch, num_experts, seq_len)
topk_tokens = torch.topk(expert_scores, k=capacity_per_expert, dim=-1)

3. Load Balancing

Auxiliary Loss:

python
def load_balancing_loss(gate_logits, expert_indices, num_experts):
    """Encourage uniform expert usage."""
    # Fraction of tokens routed to each expert
    expert_counts = torch.bincount(expert_indices.flatten(), minlength=num_experts)
    expert_fraction = expert_counts.float() / expert_indices.numel()

    # Gate probability for each expert (average across tokens)
    gate_probs = torch.softmax(gate_logits, dim=-1).mean(dim=0)

    # Auxiliary loss: encourage alignment
    aux_loss = num_experts * (expert_fraction * gate_probs).sum()

    return aux_loss

# Add to main loss
total_loss = language_model_loss + 0.01 * load_balancing_loss(...)

Router Z-Loss (Stability):

python
def router_z_loss(logits):
    """Encourage router to have lower entropy (more decisive)."""
    z_loss = torch.logsumexp(logits, dim=-1).pow(2).mean()
    return z_loss

total_loss = lm_loss + 0.01 * aux_loss + 0.001 * router_z_loss(gate_logits)

4. Expert Parallelism

python
# DeepSpeed configuration
{
  "train_batch_size": 256,
  "fp16": {"enabled": true},
  "moe": {
    "enabled": true,
    "num_experts": 128,
    "expert_parallel_size": 8,  # Distribute 128 experts across 8 GPUs
    "capacity_factor": 1.25,    # Expert capacity = tokens_per_batch * capacity_factor / num_experts
    "drop_tokens": true,        # Drop tokens exceeding capacity
    "use_residual": false
  }
}

Training Configuration

DeepSpeed MoE Config

json
{
  "train_batch_size": 256,
  "gradient_accumulation_steps": 1,
  "optimizer": {
    "type": "Adam",
    "params": {
      "lr": 0.0001,
      "betas": [0.9, 0.999],
      "eps": 1e-8
    }
  },
  "fp16": {
    "enabled": true,
    "loss_scale": 0,
    "initial_scale_power": 16
  },
  "moe": {
    "enabled": true,
    "num_experts": 128,
    "expert_parallel_size": 8,
    "moe_loss_coeff": 0.01,
    "train_capacity_factor": 1.25,
    "eval_capacity_factor": 2.0,
    "min_capacity": 4,
    "drop_tokens": true,
    "use_residual": false,
    "use_tutel": false
  },
  "zero_optimization": {
    "stage": 1
  }
}

Training Script

bash
#!/bin/bash

# Mixtral-style MoE training
deepspeed --num_gpus 8 pretrain_moe.py \
  --model-parallel-size 1 \
  --num-layers 32 \
  --hidden-size 4096 \
  --num-attention-heads 32 \
  --seq-length 2048 \
  --max-position-embeddings 4096 \
  --micro-batch-size 2 \
  --global-batch-size 256 \
  --train-iters 500000 \
  --save-interval 5000 \
  --eval-interval 1000 \
  --eval-iters 100 \
  --lr 0.0001 \
  --min-lr 0.00001 \
  --lr-decay-style cosine \
  --lr-warmup-iters 2000 \
  --clip-grad 1.0 \
  --weight-decay 0.1 \
  --num-experts 8 \
  --moe-expert-parallel-size 4 \
  --moe-loss-coeff 0.01 \
  --moe-train-capacity-factor 1.25 \
  --moe-eval-capacity-factor 2.0 \
  --disable-moe-token-dropping \
  --fp16 \
  --deepspeed \
  --deepspeed_config ds_config_moe.json \
  --data-path /path/to/data \
  --vocab-file /path/to/vocab.json \
  --merge-file /path/to/merges.txt

Advanced Patterns

Mixtral 8x7B Architecture

python
class MixtralMoEBlock(nn.Module):
    """Mixtral-style MoE block with 8 experts, top-2 routing."""

    def __init__(self, config):
        super().__init__()
        self.hidden_dim = config.hidden_size
        self.ffn_dim = config.intermediate_size
        self.num_experts = config.num_local_experts  # 8
        self.top_k = config.num_experts_per_tok       # 2

        # 8 expert FFNs
        self.experts = nn.ModuleList([
            nn.Sequential(
                nn.Linear(self.hidden_dim, self.ffn_dim, bias=False),
                nn.SiLU(),
                nn.Linear(self.ffn_dim, self.hidden_dim, bias=False)
            )
            for _ in range(self.num_experts)
        ])

        # Router
        self.gate = nn.Linear(self.hidden_dim, self.num_experts, bias=False)

    def forward(self, hidden_states):
        batch_size, sequence_length, hidden_dim = hidden_states.shape

        # Flatten
        hidden_states = hidden_states.view(-1, hidden_dim)

        # Router logits
        router_logits = self.gate(hidden_states)  # (batch * seq_len, num_experts)

        # Softmax and top-2
        routing_weights = torch.softmax(router_logits, dim=1)
        routing_weights, selected_experts = torch.topk(routing_weights, self.top_k, dim=-1)

        # Normalize routing weights
        routing_weights /= routing_weights.sum(dim=-1, keepdim=True)

        # Initialize output
        final_hidden_states = torch.zeros_like(hidden_states)

        # Route to experts
        for expert_idx in range(self.num_experts):
            expert_layer = self.experts[expert_idx]
            idx, top_x = torch.where(selected_experts == expert_idx)

            if idx.shape[0] == 0:
                continue

            # Current expert tokens
            current_hidden_states = hidden_states[idx]

            # Expert forward
            current_hidden_states = expert_layer(current_hidden_states)

            # Weighted by routing scores
            current_hidden_states *= routing_weights[idx, top_x, None]

            # Accumulate
            final_hidden_states.index_add_(0, idx, current_hidden_states)

        # Reshape
        return final_hidden_states.view(batch_size, sequence_length, hidden_dim)

PR-MoE (Pyramid-Residual-MoE)

bash
# DeepSpeed PR-MoE: 3x better parameter efficiency
deepspeed pretrain_gpt_moe.py \
  --num-layers 24 \
  --hidden-size 1024 \
  --num-attention-heads 16 \
  --num-experts "[128, 64, 32, 16]" \
  --mlp-type residual \
  --moe-expert-parallel-size 4 \
  --moe-loss-coeff 0.01 \
  --fp16

Best Practices

1. Expert Count Selection

python
# Rule of thumb: More experts = more capacity, but diminishing returns
# Typical configurations:
# - Small models (1B-7B): 8-16 experts
# - Medium models (7B-30B): 8-64 experts
# - Large models (30B+): 64-256 experts

# Example: Mixtral 8x7B
# Total params: 47B (8 experts × 7B each)
# Active params: 13B (2 experts × 7B, top-2 routing)
# Efficiency: 47B capacity with 13B compute

2. Capacity Factor Tuning

python
# Capacity = (tokens_per_batch / num_experts) * capacity_factor

# Training: Lower capacity (faster, drops some tokens)
train_capacity_factor = 1.25  # 25% buffer

# Evaluation: Higher capacity (no dropping)
eval_capacity_factor = 2.0    # 100% buffer

# Formula:
expert_capacity = int((seq_len * batch_size / num_experts) * capacity_factor)

3. Learning Rate Guidelines

python
# MoE models need lower LR than dense models
# - Dense model: lr = 6e-4
# - MoE model: lr = 1e-4 (3-6× lower)

# Also extend decay schedule
dense_lr_decay_iters = 300000
moe_lr_decay_iters = 500000  # 1.5-2× longer

4. Loss Coefficient Tuning

python
# Start with standard values
moe_loss_coeff = 0.01    # Auxiliary loss (load balancing)
router_z_loss_coeff = 0.001  # Router entropy (stability)

# If load imbalance persists, increase aux loss
if max_expert_usage / min_expert_usage > 2.0:
    moe_loss_coeff = 0.1  # Stronger load balancing

# If training unstable, increase z-loss
if grad_norm > 10.0:
    router_z_loss_coeff = 0.01

5. Avoid Common Pitfalls

python
# ❌ Bad: Using same LR as dense model
optimizer = Adam(model.parameters(), lr=6e-4)

# ✅ Good: Lower LR for MoE
optimizer = Adam([
    {'params': model.non_moe_params, 'lr': 6e-4},
    {'params': model.moe_params, 'lr': 1e-4}
])

# ❌ Bad: No load balancing
loss = lm_loss

# ✅ Good: Add auxiliary loss
loss = lm_loss + 0.01 * aux_loss + 0.001 * z_loss

# ❌ Bad: Too many experts for small dataset
num_experts = 128  # Overfitting risk

# ✅ Good: Match experts to data diversity
num_experts = 8  # Better for small datasets

Inference Optimization

Sparse Inference

python
# Only activate top-k experts (huge memory savings)
@torch.no_grad()
def moe_inference(x, model, top_k=2):
    """Sparse MoE inference: only load k experts."""
    # Router
    gate_logits = model.gate(x)
    topk_scores, topk_indices = torch.topk(
        torch.softmax(gate_logits, dim=-1),
        k=top_k,
        dim=-1
    )

    # Load and run only top-k experts
    output = torch.zeros_like(x)
    for i in range(top_k):
        expert_idx = topk_indices[:, i]
        # Load expert from disk/offload if needed
        expert = model.load_expert(expert_idx)
        output += topk_scores[:, i:i+1] * expert(x)

    return output

Resources

  • DeepSpeed MoE Tutorial: https://www.deepspeed.ai/tutorials/mixture-of-experts-nlg/
  • Mixtral Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04088
  • Switch Transformers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03961
  • HuggingFace MoE Guide: https://huggingface.co/blog/moe
  • NVIDIA MoE Blog: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/applying-mixture-of-experts-in-llm-architectures/

See Also

  • references/architectures.md - MoE model architectures (Mixtral, Switch, DeepSeek-V3)
  • references/training.md - Advanced training techniques and optimization
  • references/inference.md - Production deployment and serving patterns

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