Mixture-of-Experts · 2022

Switch Transformer

William Fedus, Barret Zoph, Noam Shazeer

Introduced the Switch Transformer, which simplifies mixture-of-experts routing to a single expert per token and pairs it with stability and distributed-training techniques to train sparse models up to a trillion parameters.

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Plain-language summary

Switch replaces the top-k MoE gate with top-1 routing so each token goes to exactly one expert, which cuts routing computation and communication while keeping a fixed compute budget per token. The paper adds selective precision, capacity factors and an auxiliary load-balancing loss, and expert-parallel sharding to make this stable at scale. The result trains far faster than dense baselines at equal FLOPs and reaches trillion-parameter counts, giving a practical template for sparse scaling.

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Provenance

Record ID
P-112
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

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