Paper Detail
Zeyu Shen, Peter Henderson
Mixture-of-Experts models, now popular for scaling capacity at fixed inference speed, switch experts at nearly every token. Once a model outgrows available GPU memory, this churn can render optimizations like offloading and pre-fetching ineffective. We make the case that the options framework in reinforcement learning is a perfect match to tackle this problem, and argue for temporally extended mixture-of-experts layers. Building on the option-critic framework with deliberation costs, we add a controller to each layer that learns when to switch expert sets and which to load. By applying this to gpt-oss-20b with low-rank adapters and a self-distillation reward, our method reduces switch rates from over 50% to below 5% while retaining up to 90% of base-model accuracy on MATH, MMLU, and MMMLU. This shows that even existing pre-trained models can be converted to temporally extended MoEs with lightweight training, with the deliberation cost allowing model trainers to trade off switching rates against capability. We hope this opens a principled path, grounded in the options framework, for memory-efficient serving and continual learning in ever-growing MoE models.
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@article{shen2026temporally,
title = {Temporally Extended Mixture-of-Experts Models},
author = {Zeyu Shen and Peter Henderson},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Mixture-of-Experts models, now popular for scaling capacity at fixed inference speed, switch experts at nearly every token. Once a model outgrows available GPU memory, this churn can render optimizations like offloading and pre-fetching ineffective. We make the case that the options framework in reinforcement learning is a perfect match to tackle this problem, and argue for temporally extended mixture-of-experts layers. Building on the option-critic framework with deliberation costs, we add a co},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20156},
keywords = {cs.LG, mixture-of-experts, reinforcement learning, options framework, option-critic framework, deliberation costs, self-distillation, low-rank adapters, GPT-oss-20b, code available, huggingface daily},
eprint = {2604.20156},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}