The Myth of Expert Specialization in MoEs: Why Routing Reflects Geometry, Not Necessarily Domain Expertise

TL;DR

This paper reveals that expert specialization in MoEs is driven by hidden state geometry rather than routing architecture, challenging common assumptions and highlighting the complexity of understanding LLM representations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that expert usage similarity is explained by hidden state geometry, not routing, and provides a theoretical account of specialization collapse and interpretability challenges.

Findings

Expert overlap between models answering the same question is only ~60%.

Load-balancing loss suppresses shared hidden state directions.

Deeper layers show similar expert activation across unrelated inputs.

Abstract

Mixture of Experts (MoEs) are now ubiquitous in large language models, yet the mechanisms behind their "expert specialization" remain poorly understood. We show that, since MoE routers are linear maps, hidden state similarity is both necessary and sufficient to explain expert usage similarity, and specialization is therefore an emergent property of the representation space, not of the routing architecture itself. We confirm this at both token and sequence level across five pre-trained models. We additionally prove that load-balancing loss suppresses shared hidden state directions to maintain routing diversity, which might provide a theoretical explanation for specialization collapse under less diverse data, e.g. small batch. Despite this clean mechanistic account, we find that specialization patterns in pre-trained MoEs resist human interpretation: expert overlap between different models answering the same question is no higher than between entirely different questions ($\sim$60\%); prompt-level routing does not predict rollout-level routing; and deeper layers exhibit near-identical expert activation across semantically unrelated inputs, especially in reasoning models. We conclude that, while the efficiency perspective of MoEs is well understood, understanding expert specialization is at least as hard as understanding LLM hidden state geometry, a long-standing open problem in the literature.