Route-Block Membership Selects Packed-AWQ Arithmetic: A Controlled Single-Fixture Mechanism Study

Abstract

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) inference first aligns routed tokens into padded expert blocks, then executes packed quantized matrix multiplication over those blocks. This preprocessing is often treated as bookkeeping. In one pre-specified Qwen3-Coder AWQ layer-6 fixture on a pinned vLLM/Marlin build and RTX 3090 runtime, we show that the tested route-block interventions select exact packed arithmetic trajectories. Two fixed preconstruction histories produced distinct native alignments and exact trajectories. Injecting the opposite alignment transferred W13, activation, routed-W2, and final outputs. Permuting two routes within one block preserved each native trajectory, while exchanging two prior-data-selected routes across the boundary between expert-106 blocks 40 and 41 transferred the complete opposite trajectory. Source- and binary-derived schedule geometry maps those blocks to direct/full-K and split/global-reduction classes. Forcing a single-slice 200-block grid made W13 bitwise equal. Stable canonical construction made both histories converge to a third exact trajectory. The confirmatory cohort contains 70 valid cold processes and seven required perturbation rejections. This is a causal mechanism result for one fixture, not a prevalence, allocator, portability, or serving-impact claim.