Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2 Architectural details and 2.1 Sparse Mixture of Experts

3 Results

3.1 Multilingual benchmarks, 3.2 Long range performance, and 3.3 Bias Benchmarks

4 Instruction Fine-tuning

5 Routing analysis

6 Conclusion, Acknowledgements, and References

Abstract

We introduce Mixtral 8x7B, a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model. Mixtral has the same architecture as Mistral 7B, with the difference that each layer is composed of 8 feedforward blocks (i.e. experts). For every token, at each layer, a router network selects two experts to process the current state and combine their outputs. Even though each token only sees two experts, the selected experts can be different at each timestep. As a result, each token has access to 47B parameters, but only uses 13B active parameters during inference. Mixtral was trained with a context size of 32k tokens and it outperforms or matches Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 across all evaluated benchmarks. In particular, Mixtral vastly outperforms Llama 2 70B on mathematics, code generation, and multilingual benchmarks. We also provide a model finetuned to follow instructions, Mixtral 8x7B – Instruct, that surpasses GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-2.1, Gemini Pro, and Llama 2 70B – chat model on human benchmarks. Both the base and instruct models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Code: https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-src

Webpage: https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts/

1 Introduction

In this paper, we present Mixtral 8x7B, a sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) with open weights, licensed under Apache 2.0. Mixtral outperforms Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks. As it only uses a subset of its parameters for every token, Mixtral allows faster inference speed at low batch-sizes, and higher throughput at large batch-sizes.

Mixtral is a sparse mixture-of-experts network. It is a decoder-only model where the feedforward block picks from a set of 8 distinct groups of parameters. At every layer, for every token, a router network chooses two of these groups (the “experts”) to process the token and combine their output additively. This technique increases the number of parameters of a model while controlling cost and latency, as the model only uses a fraction of the total set of parameters per token.

Mixtral is pretrained with multilingual data using a context size of 32k tokens. It either matches or exceeds the performance of Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5, over several benchmarks. In particular,

Mixtral demonstrates superior capabilities in mathematics, code generation, and tasks that require multilingual understanding, significantly outperforming Llama 2 70B in these domains. Experiments show that Mixtral is able to successfully retrieve information from its context window of 32k tokens, regardless of the sequence length and the location of the information in the sequence.

We also present Mixtral 8x7B – Instruct, a chat model fine-tuned to follow instructions using supervised fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization [25]. Its performance notably surpasses that of GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-2.1, Gemini Pro, and Llama 2 70B – chat model on human evaluation benchmarks. Mixtral – Instruct also demonstrates reduced biases, and a more balanced sentiment profile in benchmarks such as BBQ, and BOLD.

We release both Mixtral 8x7B and Mixtral 8x7B – Instruct under the Apache 2.0 license1 , free for academic and commercial usage, ensuring broad accessibility and potential for diverse applications. To enable the community to run Mixtral with a fully open-source stack, we submitted changes to the vLLM project, which integrates Megablocks CUDA kernels for efficient inference. Skypilot also allows the deployment of vLLM endpoints on any instance in the cloud.