SoftMoE: Soft Differentiable Routing for Mixture-of-Experts in LLMs

Abstract

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable scaling LLM parameters under a fixed inference budget by activating only a small subset of experts via top-k routing. While this preserves causality and suits autoregressive language models, the discrete top-k operator is not differentiable, forcing a fixed number of active experts per input and resulting in inefficient use of computation. We propose SoftMoE, which replaces discrete routing with a truncated soft top-k LapSum relaxation, allowing gradient-based optimization of expert routing. We further parameterize the mean number of active experts per layer and impose a global budget constraint, enabling the model to learn how to allocate expert capacity across layers. SoftMoE remains fully compatible with autoregressive modeling and achieves performance comparable to or better than sparse MoE on language modeling and downstream tasks, while activating significantly fewer experts. Notably, the learned allocation is highly non-uniform, with later layers activating more experts.