Towards Robust Calibration Dataset for Domain-General Mixture of Experts Pruning

Luis Frentzen Salim, Chia-Chun Wu, Tran Van Nhiem, Lun-Wei Ku, Yung-Hui Li

Post-training expert pruning is a promising deployment technique for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. The calibration set is an integral part of the pruning process, however, its correlation with evaluation performance is largely misunderstood and unintuitive. In this work, we present an empirical study of the robustness of calibration perturbations, specifically in MoE models. Showing how calibration size, language, and data distribution affect layer-wise expert pruning for gpt-oss-20b. Our findings reveal that (1) domain-general pruning quality receives minimal benefit from scaling calibration data beyond small sample sizes, (2) cross-lingual calibration transfers effectively, with English-only calibration maintaining strong performance across seven languages of varying typologies and scripts, and (3) a diverse calibration data resembling the pretraining distribution can yield comparable or superior performance to test-distribution data. Ultimately, we provide practical insights as a recipe for better understanding calibration for more effective domain-general expert pruning.