Paper Detail

ACE: Adapter Consolidation across Experts for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of MoE LLMs

Ahin Lee, Sehyun Yun, Joonha Park, Taesik Gong

arxiv Score 27.5

Published 2026-09-05 · First seen 2026-09-09

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of mixture-of-experts (MoE) models commonly attaches a separate low-rank adapter to each expert. This expert-wise design fragments adaptation in three ways: capacity is split across narrow low-rank updates, gradient supervision becomes sparse and imbalanced under sparse routing, and execution is decomposed into many small GEMMs. We find that such expert-wise separation is often unnecessary, as subsets of LoRA adapters become functionally similar during fine-tuning, revealing redundancy among expert-specific adapters. Based on this redundancy, we propose ACE (Adapter Consolidation across Experts), which groups redundant experts and replaces their expert-specific adapters with group-shared higher-rank LoRA modules under the same PEFT budget. ACE further introduces grouped adapter execution, which consolidates fragmented expert-wise adapter computations into fewer, larger group-level GEMMs. Across evaluations covering 12 datasets and four MoE backbones, ACE achieves the highest observed mean accuracy among the parameter-matched PEFT methods on the three backbones with complete baseline coverage, while providing $1.31\times$ to $1.48\times$ wall-clock training speedup over expert-wise LoRA without increasing peak memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/UbiquitousAILab/ACE.

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BibTeX

@article{lee2026ace,
  title = {ACE: Adapter Consolidation across Experts for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of MoE LLMs},
  author = {Ahin Lee and Sehyun Yun and Joonha Park and Taesik Gong},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of mixture-of-experts (MoE) models commonly attaches a separate low-rank adapter to each expert. This expert-wise design fragments adaptation in three ways: capacity is split across narrow low-rank updates, gradient supervision becomes sparse and imbalanced under sparse routing, and execution is decomposed into many small GEMMs. We find that such expert-wise separation is often unnecessary, as subsets of LoRA adapters become functionally similar during fine},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06072},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL},
  eprint = {2609.06072},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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