Beyond Magnitude: Contrastive Routing for Modular Mixture-of-Experts
In current Mixture-of-Experts architectures, routing is performed based on representations dominated by structure shared across all tokens, limiting expert specialization. We show that contrasting each token against an Exponential Moving Average of the layer's hidden states, rather than routing on absolute magnitude, concentrates the routing signal onto a low-dimensional, highly separable subspace. Building on this, we propose the Contrastive Routing Mechanism (CoRM), which scores each expert by the gap between its affinity for the incoming token and its affinity for this shared reference state, interpreted through a distinct per-expert projection. The resulting experts have routing bound...
| Authors | Nikolaos Xiros, Dimitrios Damianos, Maria-Eleni Zoumpoulidi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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Models and datasets referencing this paper
- ilsp/CoRM-182M-top1Model
- ilsp/CoRM-469M-top1Model
- ilsp/CoRM-182M-top2Model
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