HomeComputation & LanguagearXiv:2605.29708

Understanding Safety-Sensitive Expert Behavior in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

Computation & Language2026-05v1license

Abstract

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs rely on sparse, router-driven expert activation, yet how safety alignment interacts with routed expert specialization remains underexplored. A common intuition is that safety behavior may be controlled by routing harmful requests to distinct refusal-oriented experts. In this work, we provide empirical evidence for a different picture: routing patterns in aligned MoE LLMs are largely topic-driven, while safety behavior can be altered with little change to the model's intrinsic routing path. Motivated by this observation, we present **RASET** (**R**outer-**A**gnostic **S**afety-critical **E**xpert **T**uning), a red-teaming framework that probes safety enforcement that is localized in a small subset of experts while preserving the model's intrinsic routing behavior. **RASET** identifies safety-critical experts via a contrastive routing-sensitivity criterion and applies parameter-efficient tuning only to the selected experts, minimizing semantic disruption relative to router-steering interventions. These results reveal a distinct MoE safety risk, highlighting the need for expert-aware alignment mechanisms.

Comments: 11 pages, 4 figures

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.29708,
  title  = {Understanding Safety-Sensitive Expert Behavior in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs},
  author = {Zhibo Zhang and Yuxi Li and Zhen Ouyang and Ling Shi and Kailong Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29708},
  year   = {2026}
}