Exact Quantile Balancing and Load-Error Injection for Mixture-of-Experts
Pit Neitemeier, Jiaze Li, Alessio Serra, Philipp Scholl, Sohir Maskey
Abstract
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training requires global load balance to prevent expert under-utilization and local balance for efficient expert-parallel execution. Existing distributed Quantile Balancing (QB) uses shard-dependent or approximate global quantiles, while token-independent expert biases cannot ensure microbatch-level balance. We introduce Exact Quantile Balancing (EQB), which computes exact global-batch BF16 quantiles with negligible communication, and Load-Error Injection (LEI), which injects local load errors directly into router-score gradients. On 7.5B-parameter MoEs trained for up to 500B tokens, EQB improves global balance and downstream performance over naive QB, while LEI improves local balance and outperforms the GShard loss at comparable quality.