Dense Mixture-of-Experts as a Reparameterized Wide FFN: A Granularity Sweep at Fixed Compute

Abstract

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models combine learned routing with selection from a large expert pool. We isolate the contribution of dynamic expert combination using a dense analogue: $K$ SwiGLU experts, all active for every token and combined by a softmax gate, at fixed total FFN width. With no larger pool or discrete selection, the dense baseline is the $K=1$ case. Validation loss varies non-monotonically with $K$: $K=2$ improves over the baseline by $0.0048$, whereas $K=4$ and $K=6$ worsen it by $0.0053$ and $0.0197$, respectively. Routing generally remains soft and expert usage balanced, except in the first layer of the $K=4$ model, where routing is nearly one-hot. Forcing this gate to uniform increases loss by $2.4$ nats on a diagnostic subset, indicating that its concentrated routing is functionally important. We further show that the architecture is exactly a dense SwiGLU with token-dependent, simplex-constrained group scaling and contains the dense baseline in its function class. These single-run results suggest a granularity sweet spot for always-active, softly gated FFNs at fixed width, with $K=2$ performing best among the configurations tested.