Your Experts Have Partners. There's HOPE for Keeping Them Together
HOPE, a second-order expert pruning method for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models, accounts for pairwise expert interactions by optimizing a quadratic program based on an interaction matrix derived from calibration data. Unlike first-order methods that prune experts independently, HOPE preserves cooperative expert groups, leading to better performance—especially at high pruning rates like 50%. On benchmarks such as SWE-Bench Pro, HOPE outperforms state-of-the-art first-order methods like REAP by up to +6.1%, maintaining model quality while significantly reducing memory footprint. The method requires only a single calibration pass and efficient quadratic programming, with negligible overhead. It has been validated on Qwen3.5 and GLM-4.5 models, showing consistent improvements across diverse tasks and calibration sets.