# Bridging Local and Global Knowledge: Cascaded Mixture-of-Experts Learning for Near-Shortest Path Routing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15541 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15541/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Expert routing strategies, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Expert routing strategies](https://mlsanity.com/moe/expert-routing-strategies/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Mixture-of-Depths: Dynamically allocating compute in transformer-based language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02258/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Mixture-of-Experts: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07137/) (2025)
- [RouteNet: Leveraging Graph Neural Networks for network modeling and optimization in SDN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01508/) (2019)
- [Generalized Laplacian Positional Encoding for Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15956/) (2022)
- [Online Cascade Learning for Efficient Inference over Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04513/) (2024)
- [Agreement-Based Cascading for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02348/) (2024)
- [Local Routing in Sparse and Lightweight Geometric Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10215/) (2019)
- [A Spectral Approach to the Shortest Path Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01163/) (2020)
- [Efficient Exact Resistance Distance Computation on Small-Treewidth Graphs: a Labelling Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05129/) (2025)
- [Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning for Stabilizing Near-Shortest Path Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06640/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While deep learning models that leverage local features have demonstrated significant potential for near-optimal routing in dense Euclidean graphs, they struggle to generalize well in sparse networks where topological irregularities require broader structural awareness. To address this limitation, we train a Cascaded Mixture of Experts (Ca-MoE) to solve the all-pairs near-shortest path (APNSP) routing problem. Our Ca-MoE is a modular two-tier architecture that supports the decision-making for forwarder selection with lower-tier experts relying on local features and upper-tier experts relying on global features. It performs adaptive inference wherein the upper-tier experts are triggered only when the lower-tier ones do not suffice to achieve adequate decision quality. Computational efficiency is thus achieved by escalating model capacity only when necessitated by topological complexity, and parameter redundancy is avoided. Furthermore, we incorporate an online meta-learning strategy that facilitates independent expert fine-tuning and utilizes a stability-focused update mechanism to prevent catastrophic forgetting as new graph environments are encountered. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that Ca-MoE routing improves accuracy by up to 29.1% in sparse networks compared to single-expert baselines and maintains performance within 1%-6% of the theoretical upper bound across diverse graph densities.