Top-k MoE gating and the Switch load-balancing loss · AI Engineering

A mixture of experts layer sends each token to a few experts out of many. A router gives one logit for each expert. The layer keeps the top k experts and mixes their outputs with gate weights. The Switch Transformer paper adds an auxiliary loss so that the router spreads the tokens over all experts.

Task

Write two functions.

route(logits, top_k) returns the chosen experts and their gates for each token.
load_balancing_loss(logits, top_k) returns the auxiliary load-balancing loss as a float.

Routing. For each token, sort the experts by logit, largest first. Keep the first k experts. When two logits are equal, the expert with the lower index comes first. The gates are a softmax over the k chosen logits only:

g_{t,j} = \frac{\exp(z_{t,j})}{\sum_{i \in \text{top-}k(t)} \exp(z_{t,i})}

This is the same as the full softmax over all E experts, renormalized over the k chosen experts. The gates of a token sum to 1. Column j of the gates belongs to the expert in column j of top_idx.

Load-balancing loss. Let T be the number of tokens and E the number of experts.

f_i is the fraction of the T k assignments that go to expert i: the number of tokens that have i in their top k, divided by T k.
P_i = \frac{1}{T} \sum_t p_{t,i}, where p_t is the full softmax of the logits of token t over all E experts.
The loss is \mathcal{L} = E \sum_{i=1}^{E} f_i P_i.

With k = 1 this is the loss of the paper. The loss is 1 when the router is uniform. It grows toward E when all tokens go to one expert.

Input and output

Name	Type	Shape	Meaning
`logits`	float array	`(T, E)`	the router logit of each token for each expert
`top_k`	int		the number of experts for each token

route returns a tuple (top_idx, gates).
top_idx is an int array of shape (T, top_k). Row t holds the chosen expert indices, largest logit first.
gates is a float array of shape (T, top_k).
load_balancing_loss returns a Python float.

Constraints

1 <= T <= 256, 1 <= E <= 64 and 1 <= top_k <= E.
Logits can have an absolute value of 1000. The gates must stay finite.
f_i comes from counts. Do not use the probabilities for f_i.
Do not change the input array.
Use numpy only.

Examples

python

logits = np.array([[2.0, 1.0, 0.5, -1.0], [0.0, 3.0, 3.0, 1.0], [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0]])
top_idx, gates = route(logits, 2)

text

top_idx
[[0 1]
 [1 2]
 [0 1]]
gates
[[0.73105858 0.26894142]
 [0.5        0.5       ]
 [0.5        0.5       ]]

python

load_balancing_loss(logits, 2)
load_balancing_loss(logits, 1)
load_balancing_loss(np.zeros((5, 4)), 2)

text

1.2008139315343698
1.1983721362825372
1.0