Direct GPU Energy Measurements of Batch-Level Sharing in Mixture-of-Experts and Recurrent Models

원문 초록

Energy claims for efficient neural networks are often inferred from operation counts. We report direct GPU energy measurements on two workloads that batch very differently, recurrent policies in GPU-vectorised multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models, and ask one question of both: can the rows of a batch be made to share computation, across the batch and over time, at a measured saving? On recurrent policies the answer so far is no. Shared activity patterns exist but rarely last one step, masking a frozen policy fails, and trained-in masks succeed only because a fixed mask is equivalent to a narrow GRU, at 11x the energy of a small dense policy in our implementation. Test-time steering adds nothing beyond re-picking on either workload. On MoE models the answer is yes, and granularity decides how much: on Qwen3-30B-A3B, batch-aware routing reads 25-31% fewer expert weights within KL 0.05, with benchmark changes within noise at 500 items, and uses 12-18% less energy per token on a fused forward. We also introduce persistence-aware OEA, a one-parameter rule that keeps the batch-aware cut with about 40% fewer new experts per step than native routing at batch 32-64, though its energy has not yet been measured. These are pilot measurements on one GPU type, and we state their limits.