Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute

🤗 Upvotes: 26 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG

Authors:
Nuoya Xiong, Yuhang Zhou, Hanqing Zeng, Zhaorun Chen, Furong Huang, Shuchao Bi, Lizhu Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao

Title:
Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05106v1

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strengths across diverse domains. However, achieving strong performance across these domains with a single general-purpose model typically requires scaling to sizes that are prohibitively expensive to train and deploy. On the other hand, while smaller domain-specialized models are much more efficient, they struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. To address this dilemma, we propose FusionRoute, a robust and effective token-level multi-LLM collaboration framework in which a lightweight router simultaneously (i) selects the most suitable expert at each decoding step and (ii) contributes a complementary logit that refines or corrects the selected expert's next-token distribution via logit addition. Unlike existing token-level collaboration methods that rely solely on fixed expert outputs, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that pure expert-only routing is fundamentally limited: unless strong global coverage assumptions hold, it cannot in general realize the optimal decoding policy. By augmenting expert selection with a trainable complementary generator, FusionRoute expands the effective policy class and enables recovery of optimal value functions under mild conditions. Empirically, across both Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families and diverse benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction following, FusionRoute outperforms both sequence- and token-level collaboration, model merging, and direct fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with domain experts on their respective tasks.