Paper · arXiv 2406.06563
Skywork-MoE: A Deep Dive into Training Techniques for Mixture-of-Experts Language Models
Tianwen Wei, Bo Zhu, Liang Zhao, Cheng Cheng, Biye Li, Weiwei Lü, Peng Cheng, Jianhao Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Liang Zeng, Xiaokun Wang, Yutuan Ma, Rui Hu, Shuicheng Yan, Han Fang, Yahui Zhou
Skywork-MoE, a high-performance mixture-of-experts language model, uses upcycling and innovative techniques like gating logit normalization and adaptive auxiliary loss coefficients to achieve strong performance across benchmarks.
Abstract
In this technical report, we introduce the training methodologies implemented in the development of Skywork-MoE, a high-performance mixture-of-experts (MoE) large language model (LLM) with 146 billion parameters and 16 experts. It is initialized from the pre-existing dense checkpoints of our Skywork-13B model. We explore the comparative effectiveness of upcycling versus training from scratch initializations. Our findings suggest that the choice between these two approaches should consider both the performance of the existing dense checkpoints and the MoE training budget. We highlight two innovative techniques: gating logit normalization, which improves expert diversification, and adaptive auxiliary loss coefficients, allowing for layer-specific adjustment of auxiliary loss coefficients. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of these methods. Leveraging these techniques and insights, we trained our upcycled Skywork-MoE on a condensed subset of our SkyPile corpus. The evaluation results demonstrate that our model delivers strong performance across a wide range of benchmarks.