𓌳 REAP𓌳 the Experts: Why Pruning Prevails for One-Shot MoE Compression
📄 Paper • 💻 Code

DeepSeek-V3.2-REAP-345B-W3A16

REAP-pruned + W3A16 quantized DeepSeek-V3.2 for efficient deployment.

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Prime Intellect — Compute sponsorship
• Cerebras — REAP methodology

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📋 Model Specifications

Property	Value
Base Model	DeepSeek-V3.2
Parameters	345B
Quantization	W3A16 (3-bit weights)

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🔬 Calibration Dataset: Deep Dive

REAP's effectiveness depends critically on calibration data that represents the target use case. We specifically optimized for code generation, function/tool calling, and agentic workflows.

Why These 3 Datasets?

Dataset	Samples	Purpose	Why It Matters
evol-codealpaca-v1	700	Code generation	51% of mix — Code tasks activate specific expert pathways; pruning without code calibration destroys coding ability
xlam-function-calling-60k	330	Function/tool calling	24% of mix — Tool use requires structured JSON output; experts handling schema generation must be preserved
SWE-smith-trajectories	330	Agentic multi-turn	24% of mix — Real SWE-bench trajectories with tool calls, file edits, and multi-step reasoning

The Science Behind Dataset Selection

REAP Algorithm:
1. Forward pass calibration samples through model
2. Record which experts activate and their magnitudes
3. Compute saliency = router_weight × activation_norm
4. Prune lowest-saliency experts

Key Insight: Experts are TASK-SPECIFIC
├── Some experts specialize in natural language
├── Some experts specialize in code syntax
├── Some experts specialize in JSON/structured output
└── Some experts specialize in multi-turn context

If calibration lacks code → code-specialized experts appear "unused" → get pruned → model loses coding ability

Cerebras' Original Mix (from paper)

Cerebras used the same 3 datasets in their GLM-4.6 REAP experiments:

• evol-codealpaca-v1 for code generation
• xlam-function-calling-60k for tool calling
• SWE-smith-trajectories for agentic tasks

We followed this exact recipe for reproducibility.

Combined Dataset

Our calibration mix: 0xSero/glm47-reap-calibration-v2

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🧾 Citation

@article{lasby2025reap,
  title={REAP the Experts: Why Pruning Prevails for One-Shot MoE Compression},
  author={Lasby, Mike and Lazarevich, Ivan and Sinnadurai, Nish and Lie, Sean and Ioannou, Yani and Thangarasa, Vithursan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13999},
  year={2025},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13999}
}