Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Accuracy and Throughput Trade-offs in Multimodal VQA Benchmarks

Abstract

Abstract: Recent large language models such as Gemini-1.5, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-4 increasingly adopt Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, which offer strong efficiency-performance trade-offs by activating only a fraction of the model per token. Yet academic researchers still lack a fully open, end-to-end MoE platform for investigating scaling, routing, and expert behavior. We release FLAME-MoE, a completely open-source research suite composed of seven decoder-only models, ranging from 38M to 1.7B active parameters, whose architecture–64 experts with top-8 gating and 2 shared experts–closely

Research Question

How does the accuracy of sparse Mixture-of-Experts multimodal models on VQAv2 and OK-VQA benchmarks degrade when the number of active experts per token is reduced below the standard threshold, and what is the corresponding inference throughput gain?

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