Equation 29 · Shrink It, Train It Small, or Search for It: The Main Strategies for Small Models, Compared
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
This equation gives an approximation: it relates the quantities while allowing an approximation. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
Symbol y
y is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Symbol x
x appears in the bound of this sum. The bound states where the repeated operation starts, ends, or which values it includes.
Symbol i
i appears in the bound of this sum. The bound states where the repeated operation starts, ends, or which values it includes.
Symbol G
G appears in the bound of this sum. The bound states where the repeated operation starts, ends, or which values it includes.
Symbol E_i
is one factor in the product that computes the quantity on the left.
Symbol C_tok
ok is one factor in the product that computes the quantity on the left.
Symbol k
k occurs above the fraction bar. The numerator is divided by the entire denominator below it.
Symbol E
E occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.
Symbol C_tok^dense
oense is one factor in the product that computes the quantity on the left.
Symbol N_total
otal is one factor in the product that computes the quantity on the left.
=
The expressions on both sides represent the same quantity under the stated assumptions.
See an illustrated explanation →subscript
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
superscript
A raised number can be a power. When it is a label or bound, it selects a case or the upper limit of a sum; the formula’s structure distinguishes these uses.
See an illustrated explanation →Starting index or lower bound: i in TopK(G(x))
This label says where the repeated addition, multiplication, or accumulation starts. Read its value or condition together with the article’s description of the index.
How to interpret it
With a fixed numerator, increasing a nonzero denominator reduces the fraction. Its accuracy depends on the assumptions and range of use described in the article. Read it with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
Shazeer and colleagues stated the underlying argument for conditional computation directly: “a trainable gating network determines a sparse combination of experts to use for each example,” a mechanism they showed could scale model capacity by “over 1000x” while keeping the compute spent on any one example roughly constant [ 11 ] . The now-standard form of a sparse mixture-of-experts layer routes each token to a small top- k subset of E available experts: . with G(x) a learned gating distribution over experts. Compute per token scales with the active fraction k/E , not with the total parameter count — the whole strategy in one line.
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.