English

Dynamic Latent Routing

Machine Learning 2026-05-15 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

We investigate the temporal concatenation of sub-policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with time-varying reward functions. We introduce General Dijkstra Search (GDS), and prove that globally optimal goal-reaching policies can be recovered through temporal composition of intermediate optimal sub-policies. Motivated by the "search, select, update" principle underlying GDS, we propose Dynamic Latent Routing (DLR), a language-model post-training method that jointly learns discrete latent codes, routing policies, and model parameters through dynamic search in a single training stage. In low-data fine-tuning settings, DLR matches or outperforms supervised fine-tuning across four datasets and six models, achieving a mean gain of +6.6 percentage points, while prior discrete-latent baselines consistently underperform SFT. Mechanistic analyses and targeted code ablations show that DLR learns structured routing behaviors with distinct causal roles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.14323,
  title  = {Dynamic Latent Routing},
  author = {Fangyuan Yu and Xin Su and Amir Abdullah},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14323},
  year   = {2026}
}