@inproceedings{he-etal-2026-tenp,
    title = "{TENP}: Trapezoidal Expert Neuron Pruning For Mixture-of-Experts",
    author = "He, Jiangyang  and
      Zhu, Shaolin  and
      Xiong, Deyi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1049/",
    pages = "20911--20925",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Mixture-of-Experts large language models (LLMs) scale efficiently through sparse activation, yet their deployment is fundamentally constrained by the large static parameter footprint of experts. Existing compression approaches either remove entire experts, disrupting routing topology and harming performance, or rely on unstructured weight pruning with limited practical efficiency. To address the limitations, we propose TENP, a structured **T**rapezoidal **E**xpert **N**euron **P**runing framework. Using a few samples, we identify and retain important experts, while applying expert neuron pruning (ENP) to less important experts, preserving model parameters in a trapezoidal pattern from shallow to deep layers. When evaluating expert importance, we jointly consider both the magnitude of the expert output and its ability to change the direction of the input vector. For ENP, we measure each neuron{'}s projected contribution to the expert output to identify and retain important neurons. We conduct extensive experiments on the Qwen and DeepSeek models. Under a routing expert sparsity of 40{\%} and an average of 63.76{\%} activated expert parameters, the DeepSeek model suffers only a 1-point drop in accuracy compared to the full-parameter model. Moreover, it outperforms the full-parameter model by 10{\%} on code generation tasks."
}