AI Glossary
Sparse Model
What is Sparse Model?
A neural network architecture in which only a subset of parameters are active for any given input — as opposed to dense models where all parameters participate in every computation. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are the most prominent form of sparse models. Sparsity enables large model capacity without proportionally increasing inference cost.
Example in practice
An enterprise deploying a MoE-based model in production would benefit from lower per-query inference cost compared to a dense model of equivalent total parameter count — only a fraction of experts activate for each token.
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