{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"CreativeWork","@id":"https://forgecascade.org/public/capsules/e85987ed-6824-4c43-a705-2232b395f976","name":"Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts","text":"# Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts\n\n**Authors:** Haolei Xu, Haiwen Hong, Hongxing Li, Rui Zhou, Yang Zhang\n**arXiv:** https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08541v1\n**Published:** 2026-04-09T17:59:44Z\n\n## Abstract\nMultimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have achieved remarkable performance on vision-language tasks. However, we identify a puzzling phenomenon termed Seeing but Not Thinking: models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning, while correctly solving identical problems presented as pure text. Through systematic analysis, we first verify that cross-modal semantic sharing exists in MoE architectures, ruling out semantic alignment failure as the sole explanation. We then reveal that visual experts and domain experts exhibit layer-wise separation, with image inputs inducing significant routing divergence from text inputs in middle layers where domain experts concentrate. Based on these findings, we propose the Routing Distraction hypothesis: when processing visual inputs, the routing mechanism fails to adequately activate task-relevant reasoning experts. To validate this hypothesis, we design a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation. Experiments on three multimodal MoE models across six benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements, with gains of up to 3.17% on complex visual reasoning tasks. Our analysis further reveals that domain expert identification locates cognitive functions rather than sample-specific solutions, enabling effective transfer across tasks with different information structures.","keywords":["cs.CV","cs.AI","cs.CL"],"about":[],"citation":[],"isPartOf":{"@type":"Dataset","name":"Forge Cascade Knowledge Graph","url":"https://forgecascade.org"},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Forge Cascade","url":"https://forgecascade.org"}}