Mixture-of-Experts language models are cheap to run per token but expensive to hold in GPU memory, which drives the cost of serving them in production. One-shot expert compression shrinks them after a single calibration pass. Its two current state-of-the-art methods are REAP for expert pruning, which deletes the least salient experts, and REAM for expert merging, which merges them into the most salient ones. Both have been evaluated only on academic benchmarks.
We compare the two on five multilingual production tasks of a web-hosting company, from classification to the generation of marketing HTML email templates, with two 30B-parameter models (Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 and the hybrid Mamba-attention Nemotron-3.5-Lightning) at 25% and 50% of experts removed and the same calibration data. Pruning wins: