Routing Divergence Is Not Evidence of Behavioral Influence in Same-Weight MoE Self-Distillation
Two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) forward passes can share every weight yet route the same token through different experts. This creates a possible blind spot in same-weight self-distillation, where a demonstration-conditioned teacher supervises a query-only student. We study this mismatch in its single-step form, with frozen weights rather than as a proxy for a full training trajectory. An exact blockwise decomposition separates a routing term, which changes gates at fixed content, from a dense-like content term. Across seven open-weight checkpoints and two domains, the routing term spans only $1.6\times$ as a fraction of block output, while its residual-stream exposure spans $3.2\times$. Exp...
| Authors | Cedric Caruzzo, Donggeun Yoo, Tae Soo Kim |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 16 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 August 2026 |
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