exp014_te_dispatch — the router-solidifier v1 (CANDIDATE s0; s1 running)
Question. Does text-side addressing in the DISPATCH KEY (a trained text-encoder adapter, or the frozen canonical byte-trigram address) route the expert bank better than state+sigma keys alone?
Arms (flow trunk, fused cache, A=4 r=8 banks, dense signed dispatch): sigma_key (control) | addr_key (frozen [32,128] address flattened → key) | te_key (trained CLIP-pooler adapter → key).
Results (results.json):
| arm | val flow-MSE | per-prompt usage var | shuffled-key null |
|---|---|---|---|
| sigma_key | 0.57371 | 2.36e-02 | 0 (no text) |
| addr_key | 0.57755 | 1.40e-05 (dead) | 1.40e-05 |
| te_key | 0.57422 | 2.60e-02 | 2.71e-02 |
Verdict (honest negative + two instrument findings).
- P1 MISS: no val win for text keys at this scale (all within 0.07%).
- The hidden-state key already routes by prompt (2.36e-02 usage variance with zero text input) — prompt-level structure reaches the usage surface through x itself; exp007's flatness was across SIGMA BANDS, a different axis. The TE key adds ~nothing on top.
- The raw-flattened address kills routing (1.4e-05) and dents val — reproducing the text line's documented disease geometry (addressing raw high-D flattens the oriented softmax; healthy forms bottleneck to low-D FIRST). The canonical address needs a structured reduction (slots/M̂ read) before it can serve as a router key — v2's design, not a defect of the address itself.
- Confessed instrument gap: the shuffled-key null measures key DIVERSITY, not routing CORRECTNESS (te null ≈ te real). v2's null: repeated-key, plus matched-vs-mismatched key val deltas.
Caveats. s0 (s1 running); one scale (A=4, 3k steps); pooler-only TE feature; flow trunk only. Cost ≈ 4.6 GPU-h incl. text-feature build.
SEED-1 (2026-07-19, results_s1.json) — 2-SEED: the ordering replicates
sigma 0.57219 < te 0.57468 < addr 0.57769 (same order both seeds); addr routing dead both seeds (5.6e-06/1.4e-05); state-key prompt variance present both seeds (2.9e-02/2.4e-02). Router v1's negative and both instrument findings are seed-robust. v2 = MÌ‚-bottlenecked address key + repeated-key null.