ICML 2026 论文列表

International Conference on Machine Learning

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6,341篇论文

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Skill-Based Mixture-of-Experts: Adaptive Routing for Heterogeneous Reasoning via Inferred Skills

Justin Chen, Sukwon Yun, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Tianlong Chen, Mohit Bansal

展开摘要

Combining existing pre-trained LLMs is a promising approach for diverse reasoning tasks. However, task-level expert selection is often too coarse-grained, since different instances may require different expertise. To address this, we propose Skill-MoE, a symbolic, skill-based, and gradient-free Mixture-of-Experts framework for instance-level expert selection. Skill-MoE infers skills (e.g., algebra in mathematics) from each query, selects experts based on skill relevance, and lets each expert generate its own reasoning. The resulting k outputs are then synthesized by an aggregator chosen for its ability to integrate diverse responses. While instance-level selection substantially improves performance, naively implementing it incurs heavy overhead from repeated model loading and offloading. We address this with a batch inference strategy that groups instances by assigned experts, allowing each model to be loaded only once. As a result, Skill-MoE integrates 16 expert models on a single GPU with runtime comparable to prior multi-agent baselines using 4 GPUs. Across diverse benchmarks (MMLU-Pro, GPQA, AIME, and MedMCQA), Skill-MoE achieves an average absolute improvement of 8.15% over the best baseline. It also generalizes well to unseen tasks and outperforms discussion-based methods without requiring expensive multi-round interactions.

Poster
Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

Gina Wong, Drew Prinster, Suchi Saria, Rama Chellappa, Anqi Liu

展开摘要

Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

Poster
LiME: Lightweight Mixture of Experts for Efficient Multimodal Multi-task Learning

Md Kowsher, Haris Mansoor, Nusrat Jahan Prottasha, Ozlem Garibay, Victor Zhu, Zhengping Ji, Chen Chen

展开摘要

MoE-PEFT methods combine Mixture of Experts with parameter-efficient fine-tuning for multi-task adaptation, but require separate adapters per expert—causing trainable parameters to scale linearly with expert count and limiting applicability to adapter-based architectures. We propose LiME (Lightweight Mixture of Experts), which achieves expert specialization through lightweight modulation rather than adapter replication. Instead of separate adapters, LiME uses a single shared PEFT module and modulates its output with lightweight expert vectors, reducing expert parameters while generalizing to any PEFT method. Notably, LiME introduces zero-parameter routing by leveraging existing frozen and adapted representations—eliminating learned router parameters typically required per layer. Theoretically, we prove that (i) more experts preserve more task-relevant information and (ii) modulation approximates full expert-specific PEFT with bounded error. LiME further incorporates n-gram windowed routing and adaptive expert selection (Auto Top-K) based on routing confidence. Experiments on MMT-47, a multimodal multi-task benchmark with 47 tasks spanning text, image, and video, demonstrate that LiME achieves competitive or superior performance while using up to 4× fewer trainable parameters and up to 29% faster training compared to corresponding MoE-PEFT baselines.

Spotlight
X-MoGe: A Cross-Modal Adaptation Framework with Mixture-of-Experts and Geometry Guidance for Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

Wenkai Lin, Zhihong Liu, Chenglu Wen

展开摘要

Multi-agent collaborative perception improves perception range and robustness in autonomous driving. However, most existing methods assume homogeneous sensors and perception networks, which is unrealistic in real-world heterogeneous systems. Differences in sensing modalities and independently trained models lead to significant semantic and geometric inconsistencies, limiting effective collaboration. To solve these problems, we propose a novel cross-modal adaptation framework with Mixture-of-Experts and geometry-guided fusion for heterogeneous collaborative perception, named X-MoGe. Specifically, we propose a Pixel-level Mixture-of-Experts (P-MoE) module, which adaptively models modality-specific semantic characteristics under heterogeneous sensing conditions. In addition, a geometry-guided feature fusion module incorporates explicit geometric priors to enforce spatial alignment and consistency in the BEV space. Extensive experiments on OPV2V and DAIR-V2X datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in heterogeneous collaborative perception.

Poster
Compositional Generative Modeling from Decentralized Data

Mashrur M. Morshed, Vishnu Boddeti

展开摘要

Learning the compositional nature of the physical world requires joint observation of interacting factors. However, because practical data is often decentralized, these factors are fragmented across isolated silos. Existing decentralized generative approaches focus only on modeling the union of siloed data, overlooking novel combinations implied by the collective whole. To bridge this gap, we introduce Decentralized Compositional Flow Matching (DCFM), a framework that enforces structural constraints across the global set of generative factors, without exchanging any raw data. DCFM enables novel combinations to emerge through peer interactions, even when no single data source can independently support the composition. Empirically, DCFM substantially outperforms federated learning and mixture-of-experts baselines across conditional image generation, robotic spatial planning, and medical attribute co-occurrence modeling.

Poster
Mixture of Concept Bottleneck Experts

Francesco De Santis, Gabriele Ciravegna, Giovanni De Felice, Arianna Casanova, Francesco Giannini, Michelangelo Diligenti, Johannes Schneider, Danilo Giordano, Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga, Pietro Barbiero

展开摘要

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) promote interpretability by grounding predictions in human-understandable concepts. However, existing CBMs typically constrain their task predictor to a single expression whose functional form is set a priori, limiting both predictive accuracy and adaptability to diverse user needs. We propose Mixture of Concept Bottleneck Experts (M-CBEs), a framework that generalizes existing CBMs along two dimensions: the number of expressions, referred to as experts, employed by the task predictor to map concepts to the task, and the functional form each expression takes, thus exposing an underexplored region of this design space. We investigate this region by instantiating two novel models: Linear M-CBE, which learns a finite set of linear expressions, and Symbolic M-CBE, which leverages symbolic regression to discover expert functions from data subject to user-specified operator vocabularies. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that varying the number of expressions and their functional form provides a robust framework for navigating the accuracy-interpretability trade-off.

Spotlight
Dynamic TMoE: A Drift-Aware Dynamic Mixture of Experts Framework for Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting

Jiawen Zhu, Shuhan Liu, Di Weng, Yingcai Wu

展开摘要

Non-stationary time series forecasting is challenged by evolving distribution shifts that static models struggle to capture. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a promising paradigm for decoupling complex drift patterns, existing approaches are limited by fixed expert pools and memoryless routing, hampering their ability to adapt to abrupt regime shifts. To address this, we propose **Dynamic TMoE**, a framework that unifies architectural evolution with temporal continuity during learning phase. By detecting distribution shifts via Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), we dynamically instantiate heterogeneous experts and prune redundant ones to optimize capacity. Additionally, a temporal memory router leverages recurrent states and an anomaly repository to ensure stable, context-aware expert selection without requiring test-time updates. Experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, reducing MSE by 10.4\% and MAE by 7.8\%. Code is available at https://github.com/andone-07/Dynamic-TMoE.

Poster
Continual Model Routing in Evolving Model Hubs

Jack Bell, Giacomo Carfi', Gerlando Gramaglia, Vincenzo Lomonaco

展开摘要

AI model hubs provide access to a rapidly growing collection of powerful pre-trained models, enabling off-the-shelf mixture-of-experts systems with different routing strategies. However, this rapid growth poses two fundamental challenges: scaling model selection across thousands of experts and continually updating routing mechanisms as new models and tasks are introduced. In this paper, we formalise this setting as Continual Model Routing (CMR) and propose *CMRBench*, a new large-scale benchmark simulating realistic hub expansion and including over 2,000 candidate models. Finally, we introduce *CARvE*, a contrastive embedding approach for efficient continual model routing via domain-stratified coreset replay and checkpoint-based anchoring. Extensive empirical results and ablations show that CARvE significantly outperforms zero-shot retrieval, fine-tuning, and adapter-merging baselines in model, family, and domain-level accuracy.

Poster
Mean-Shift PCA by Knockoff Mean

Mengda Li, Zeng Li, Jianfeng Yao

展开摘要

Removing noise is difficult, but adding noise is easy. In this work, we show how to eliminate mean-shift noisy components from PCA by deliberately introducing knockoff mean-shift perturbation. Standard PCA is highly sensitive to shifts in the sample mean: a small fraction of samples from a shifted distribution can cause large deviations in the leading principal components. In high-dimensional regimes, existing Robust PCA approaches cannot handle the mean-shift contamination structure inherent in the mixture model. Using tools from Random Matrix Theory, we prove that the mean-shift spikes are spectrally separable from the stable eigenvalues of the original covariance. Furthermore, the original eigenspace remains asymptotically invariant to the contamination, independent of the mixture weight. Exploiting this spectral stability, we propose a simple, two-stage PCA algorithm by adding knockoff mean that identifies and removes the mean-shift component using only standard PCA operations.

Poster
Don't Reinvent the Wheel, Just Realign the Spokes: Resource-Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning via Rank-Wise Expert Assembly

Yebo Wu, Jingguang Li, Zhijiang Guo, Li Li

展开摘要

Federated fine-tuning presents a promising avenue for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks while preserving data privacy. However, the prohibitive computational and communication overhead of LLM adaptation inhibits its deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this paper, we propose SmartFed, a resource-efficient framework that circumvents expensive training from scratch by intelligently reusing knowledge embedded in existing LoRA modules. To fully exploit this potential and ensure scalability, we introduce the Mixture of Rank-Wise Experts (MoRE). MoRE decomposes LoRA modules into fine-grained rank-level experts, which are selectively activated based on input semantics and resource budgets. Furthermore, to optimize resource utilization, we propose Elastic Expert Quota Allocation (EEQA), a strategy that adaptively distributes expert capacity across parameter matrices based on their contribution to model performance. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SmartFed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both model performance and training efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/benmagnifico/SmartFed.

Spotlight
Eigenvectors of Experts are Training-free Non-collapsing Routers

Giang Do, Hung Le, Truyen Tran

展开摘要

Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) architectures improve the training efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) by routing input tokens to a selected subset of specialized experts. Despite their remarkable success, both training and inference in SMoE models suffer from the *expert collapse* issue (Chi et al., 2022a), which degrades model performance. Prior studies primarily focus on improving the router; however, such methods rely on training from scratch or fine-tuning, which requires high computational and data-processing costs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, despite these efforts, the issue persists when advancing well-pretrained SMoE models, as evidenced by both theoretical and empirical results. To fill that gap, we analyze the advanced SMoE models and observe that the eigenvectors of expert weight matrices encode rich semantic information, pointing to an effective alternative to conventional routing strategies. Building on this insight, we propose **Singular Value Decomposition SMoE (SSMoE)**, a novel and *training-free* framework that leverages spectral properties of the expert weights to address the collapse issue and enhance model performance. Extensive experiments across diverse language and vision tasks, under both clean and corrupt data settings, demonstrate the strong generalization and robustness of SSMoE. Our findings highlight how a deeper understanding of model internals can guide the development of more effective SMoE architectures.

Spotlight
HyPER: Bridging Exploration and Exploitation for Scalable LLM Reasoning with Hypothesis Path Expansion and Reduction

Shengxuan Qiu, Haochen Huang, Shuzhang Zhong, Pengfei Zuo, Meng Li

展开摘要

Scaling test-time compute with multi-path chain-of-thought can improve reasoning accuracy, but its gains hinge on an effective exploration–exploitation trade-off. Existing methods handle this trade-off in rigid ways: tree-structured search hard-codes exploration via brittle expansion rules that disrupt post-trained reasoning, while parallel reasoning over-explores redundant hypothesis paths and relies on a weak answer selection strategy. Driven by the insight that the optimal balance is *phase-dependent* and that correct vs. incorrect paths often *diverge only at late stages*, we reconceptualize test-time scaling as a dynamic *expand–reduce* control problem over a pool of hypothesis paths. We introduce **HyPER**, a *training-free online control policy* for MoE multi-path decoding that reallocates compute under a fixed budget using lightweight path statistics. HyPER features (i) an *online controller* that shifts from exploration to exploitation as the hypothesis pool evolves, (ii) an MoE-based token-level refinement primitive for efficient *generation-time exploitation* without full-path resampling, and (iii) a length- and confidence-aware aggregation rule to bridge the existence–selection gap for reliable *answer-time exploitation*. Extensive experimental results across four MoE models and diverse benchmarks demonstrate HyPER consistently achieves the accuracy–compute Pareto frontier, outperforming prior-art methods by 8-10% while reducing token consumption by 25-40%.

Poster
SD-MoE: Spectral Decomposition for Effective Expert Specialization

Ruijun Huang, Fang Dong, Xin Zhang, Anrui Chen, Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Jixian Zhou, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Robert P. Dick, Yuan Cheng, Fan Yang, Tun Lu, Chun Zhang, Li Shang

展开摘要

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale Large Language Models via expert specialization induced by conditional computation. In practice, however, expert specialization often fails: some experts become functionally similar, while others functioning as de facto shared experts, limiting the effective capacity and model performance. In this work, we analysis from a spectral perspective on parameter and gradient spaces, uncover that (1) experts share highly overlapping dominant spectral components in their parameters, (2) dominant gradient subspaces are strongly aligned across experts, driven by ubiquitous low-rank structure in human corpus, and (3) gating mechanisms preferentially route inputs along these dominant directions, further limiting specialization. To address this, we propose Spectral-Decoupled MoE (SD-MoE), which decomposes both parameter and gradient in the spectral space. SD-MoE improves performance across downstream tasks, enables effective expert specialization, incurring minimal additional computation, and can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of existing MoE architectures, including Qwen and DeepSeek.

Poster
Mining Tensor/Neuron-Level Sparsity to Maximize Mixture-of-Experts Potential in Post-Training and Inference

Weilin Cai, Le Qin, Shwai He, Junwei Cui, Ang Li, Jiayi Huang

展开摘要

Mixture of Experts (MoE) has emerged as a mainstream architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs), balancing computational efficiency with model scalability. While prior work has explored increasing tensor-level sparsity via finer-grained expert configurations during pre-training, we identify significant unexploited sparsity at both the tensor and neuron levels during post-training and inference. To leverage this, we propose complete expert partition for post-training and threshold-based token-expert dropping for inference. These techniques improve the Mixtral-8$\times$7B model's average accuracy by 1\% across nine downstream benchmarks (notably 4\% on GSM8K). To further optimize the accuracy-efficiency trade-off for inference, we introduce dual-threshold token-expert dropping with partial expert partition and reconstruction. Our approach yields a 1.19$\times$ MoE speedup and a 0.5\% accuracy gain on Mixtral-8$\times$7B when combining post-training and inference optimizations. For inference-only optimization on OLMoE-Instruct and DeepSeek-V2-Lite-Chat, we achieve up to 1.41$\times$ MoE speedup with a negligible accuracy loss ($<$0.5\%).

Poster
Decomposing the Basic Abilities of Large Language Models: Mitigating Cross-Task Interference in Multi-Task Instruct-Tuning

Bing Wang, Ximing Li, Changchun Li, Jinjin Chi, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama

展开摘要

Recently, the prominent performance of large language models (LLMs) has been largely driven by multi-task instruct-tuning. Unfortunately, this training paradigm suffers from a key issue, named cross-task interference, due to conflicting gradients over shared parameters among different tasks. Some previous methods mitigate this issue by isolating task-specific parameters, e.g., task-specific neuron selection and mixture-of-experts. In this paper, we empirically reveal that the cross-task interference still exists for the existing solutions because of many parameters also shared by different tasks, and accordingly, we propose a novel solution, namely Basic Abilities Decomposition for multi-task Instruct-Tuning (BADIT). Specifically, we empirically find that certain parameters are consistently co-activated, and that co-activated parameters naturally organize into base groups. This motivates us to analogize that LLMs encode several orthogonal basic abilities, and that any task can be represented as a linear combination of these abilities. Accordingly, we propose BADIT that decomposes LLM parameters into orthogonal high-singular-value LoRA experts representing basic abilities, and dynamically enforces their orthogonality during training via spherical clustering of rank-1 components. We conduct extensive experiments on the SuperNI benchmark with 6 LLMs, and empirical results demonstrate that BADIT can outperform SOTA methods and mitigate the degree of cross-task interference.

Poster
Parameters as Experts: Adapting Vision Models with Dynamic Parameter Routing

Meng Lou, Stanley Yu, Yizhou Yu

展开摘要

Adapting pre-trained vision models using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) remains challenging, as it aims to achieve performance comparable to full fine-tuning using a minimal number of trainable parameters. When applied to complex dense prediction tasks, existing methods exhibit limitations, including input-agnostic modeling and redundant cross-layer representations. To this end, we propose ParaX, a new adapter-style method featuring a simple mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, we introduce shared expert centers, where each expert is a trainable parameter matrix. During a feedforward pass, each ParaX module in the network dynamically generates weight matrices tailored for the current module via a simple dynamic parameter routing mechanism, which selectively aggregates parameter matrices in the corresponding expert center. Dynamic weight matrices in ParaX modules facilitate low-rank adaptation in an input-dependent manner, thus generating more customized and powerful feature representations. Moreover, since ParaX modules across multiple network layers share the same expert center, they improve feature diversity by promoting implicit cross-layer feature interaction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ParaX across diverse visual recognition tasks. Code is publicly released at: https://github.com/LMMMEng/ParaX.

Poster
Unified Multimodal Visual Tracking with Dual Mixture-of-Experts

Lingyi Hong, Jinglun Li, Xinyu Zhou, Kaixun Jiang, Pinxue Guo, Zhaoyu Chen, Runze Li, Xingdong Sheng, Wenqiang Zhang

展开摘要

Multimodal visual object tracking can be divided into to several kinds of tasks (e.g. RGB and RGB+X tracking), based on the input modality. Existing methods often train separate models for each modality or rely on pretrained models to adapt to new modalities, which limits efficiency, scalability, and usability. Thus, we introduce OneTrackerV2, a unified multi-modal tracking framework that enables end-to-end training for any modality. We propose Meta Merger to embed multi-modal information into a unified space, allowing flexible modality fusion and robustness. We further introduce Dual Mixture-of-Experts (DMoE): T-MoE models spatiotemporal relations for tracking, while M-MoE embeds multi-modal knowledge, disentangling cross-modal dependencies and reducing feature conflicts. With a shared architecture, unified parameters, and a single end-to-end training, OneTrackerV2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across five RGB and RGB+X tracking tasks and 12 benchmarks, while maintaining high inference efficiency. Notably, even after model compression, OneTrackerV2 retains strong performance. Moreover, OneTrackerV2 demonstrates remarkable robustness under modality-missing scenarios.

Poster
$\phi$-Balancing for Mixture-of-Experts Training

Lizhang Chen, Jonathan Li, Qi Wang, Runlong Liao, Shuozhe Li, Chen Liang, Ni Lao, Qiang Liu

展开摘要

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on balanced expert utilization to fully realize their scalability. However, existing load-balancing methods are largely heuristic and operate on noisy mini-batch assignment statistics, introducing bias relative to population-level objectives. We propose **$\phi$-balancing**, a principled framework that directly targets population-level expert balance by minimizing a strictly convex, symmetric, and differentiable potential of the expected routing distribution. Using convex duality, we derive an equivalent min-max formulation and obtain a simple online algorithm via mirror descent, yielding an efficient EMA-based routing adjustment with negligible overhead. Across large-scale pretraining and downstream fine-tuning, $\phi$-balancing consistently outperforms prior Switch-style and loss-free baselines, demonstrating more stable and effective expert utilization.

Poster
Least-Loaded Expert Parallelism: Load Balancing An Imbalanced Mixture-of-Experts

Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Shrey Pandit, Austin Xu, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty

展开摘要

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are typically pre-trained with explicit load-balancing constraints to ensure statistically balanced expert routing. Despite this, we observe that even well-trained MoE models exhibit significantly imbalanced routing. This behavior is arguably natural—and even desirable—as imbalanced routing allows models to concentrate domain-specific knowledge within a subset of experts. Expert parallelism (EP) is designed to scale MoE models by distributing experts across multiple devices, but with a less-discussed assumption of balanced routing. Under extreme imbalance, EP can funnel a disproportionate number of tokens to a small number of experts, leading to compute- and memory-bound failures on overloaded devices during post-training or inference, where explicit load balancing is often inapplicable. We propose Least-Loaded Expert Parallelism (LLEP), a novel EP algorithm that dynamically reroutes excess tokens and associated expert parameters from overloaded devices to underutilized ones. This ensures that all devices complete their workloads within the minimum collective latency while respecting memory constraints. Across different model scales, LLEP achieves up to 5x speedup and 4x reduction in peak memory usage compared to standard EP. This enables faster and higher-throughput post-training and inference, with ~1.9x faster for gpt-oss-120b. We support our method with extensive theoretical analysis and comprehensive empirical evaluations, including ablation studies. These results illuminate key trade-offs and enable a principled framework for hardware-specific hyper-parameter tuning to achieve optimal performance.

Poster
Capacity-Aware Mixture Law Enables Efficient LLM Data Optimization

Jingwei Li, Xinran Gu, Jingzhao Zhang

展开摘要

A data mixture refers to how different data sources are combined to train large language models, and selecting an effective mixture is crucial for optimal downstream performance. Existing methods either conduct costly searches directly on the target model or rely on mixture scaling laws that fail to extrapolate well to large model sizes. We address these limitations by introducing a compute-efficient pipeline for data mixture scaling. First, we propose CAMEL, a capacity-aware mixture law that models validation loss with the nonlinear interplay between model size and mixture. We also introduce a loss-to-benchmark prediction law that estimates benchmark accuracy from validation loss, enabling end-to-end performance prediction for the target model. Next, we study how to allocate a fixed compute budget across model scales to fit the law and reduce prediction error. Finally, we apply our method to Mixture-of-Experts models with up to 7B-A150M parameters to fit the law, and verify the optimal mixture derived from the law by extrapolating to a 55B-A1.2B target model. Compared to prior methods, we reduce mixture optimization costs by 50\% and improves downstream benchmark performance by up to 3\%.

Poster