When Does Sparse MoE Help in Vision? The Role of Backbone Compute Leverage in Sparse Routing
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks promise favorable accuracy-compute trade-offs, yet practical vision deployments are hindered by expert collapse and limited end-to-end efficiency gains. We study when sparse top-$k$ routing with hard capacity constraints helps in vision classification, evaluated under multi-seed protocols on four benchmarks (CIFAR-10/100, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet-1K). We observe a \emph{compute-leverage pattern}: positive accuracy gaps require a substantial fraction $ρ$ of total FLOPs to be routed; at ImageNet scale this is necessary but not sufficient, as multi-expert routing ($k \geq 2$) is additionally required. Two controlled experiments isolate these factors. A hidden...
| Authors | Libo Sun, Po-wei Harn, Peixiong He et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.