# One Student Knows All Experts Know: From Sparse to Dense

Source: [One Student Knows All Experts Know: From Sparse to Dense](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6dba1e209131cea3b992>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:56:55.829Z

Authors: Fuzhao Xue, Xiaoxin He, Xiaozhe Ren, Yuxuan Lou, Yang You

Published: 2022-01-26T12:11:02.000Z

## Abstract

Human education system trains one student by multiple experts. Mixture-of-experts (MoE) is a powerful sparse architecture including multiple experts. However, sparse MoE model is easy to overfit, hard to deploy, and not hardware-friendly for practitioners. In this work, inspired by the human education model, we propose a novel task, knowledge integration, to obtain a dense student model (OneS) as knowledgeable as one sparse MoE. We investigate this task by proposing a general training framework including knowledge gathering and knowledge distillation. Specifically, to gather key knowledge from different pre-trained experts, we first investigate four different possible knowledge gathering methods, \\ie summation, averaging, Top-K Knowledge Gathering (Top-KG), and Singular Value Decomposition Knowledge Gathering (SVD-KG) proposed in this paper. We then refine the dense student model by knowledge distillation to offset the noise from gathering. On ImageNet, our OneS preserves $61.7\\%$ benefits from MoE and achieves $78.4\\%$ top-1 accuracy ImageNet with only $15$M parameters. On four natural language processing datasets, OneS obtains $88.2\\%$ MoE benefits and outperforms the best baseline by $51.7\\%$ using the same architecture and training data. In addition, compared with the MoE counterpart, OneS can achieve $3.7 \\times$ inference speedup due to less computation and hardware-friendly architecture.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10890>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10890.pdf>)
