[fix] keep the MoE router trainable at num_experts_per_tok=1

Normalising a single top-k weight by its own sum gives exactly 1.0 for every
token, so the gate leaves the graph entirely: topk_idx is a discrete index and
the weight is now a constant, which leaves the LM loss no differentiable path
to the router. It then trains on aux_loss alone, whose optimum is a uniform
distribution, and the experts never specialise.

Measured on MOEFeedForward with router_aux_loss_coef=0, so only the LM path can
contribute a gradient:

  num_experts_per_tok=1, norm_topk_prob=True   7.02e-10   <- current default
  num_experts_per_tok=1, norm_topk_prob=False  1.02e-02
  num_experts_per_tok=2, norm_topk_prob=True   1.67e-02

Only normalise when there is more than one weight to normalise.

Note this changes the forward pass for existing num_experts_per_tok=1 MoE
checkpoints: the expert output was scaled by a constant 1.0 and is now scaled
by the gate probability.

Closes #858.
pull/859/head
basil-k-aji-dev 2026-09-17 21:31:41 +05:30
parent 7a9137d2e9
commit 1c876435ef
1 changed files with 8 additions and 1 deletions

View File

@ -158,7 +158,14 @@ class MOEFeedForward(nn.Module):
x_flat = x.view(-1, hidden_dim) x_flat = x.view(-1, hidden_dim)
scores = F.softmax(self.gate(x_flat), dim=-1) scores = F.softmax(self.gate(x_flat), dim=-1)
topk_weight, topk_idx = torch.topk(scores, k=self.config.num_experts_per_tok, dim=-1, sorted=False) topk_weight, topk_idx = torch.topk(scores, k=self.config.num_experts_per_tok, dim=-1, sorted=False)
if self.config.norm_topk_prob: topk_weight = topk_weight / (topk_weight.sum(dim=-1, keepdim=True) + 1e-20) # Normalising a single top-k weight by its own sum yields 1.0 for every
# token, so the gate drops out of the graph: topk_idx is discrete and the
# weight is now a constant, leaving the LM loss no path to the router. It
# then trains on aux_loss alone, whose optimum is a uniform distribution,
# and the experts never specialise. Only normalise when there is more than
# one weight to normalise.
if self.config.norm_topk_prob and self.config.num_experts_per_tok > 1:
topk_weight = topk_weight / (topk_weight.sum(dim=-1, keepdim=True) + 1e-20)
y = torch.zeros_like(x_flat) y = torch.zeros_like(x_flat)
for i, expert in enumerate(self.experts): for i, expert in enumerate(self.experts):
mask = (topk_idx == i) mask = (topk_idx == i)