LLM Router: Rethinking Routing with Prefill Activations
About
LLMs often achieve similar average benchmark accuracies while exhibiting complementary strengths on different subsets of queries, suggesting that a router with query-specific model selection can outperform any single model. While existing routers rely on semantic query features, they often fail to capture model-specific failures or intrinsic task difficulty. We instead study routing via internal prefill activations. Our key idea, Encoder-Target Decoupling, separates the model that produces the predictive signal (the Encoder) from the model whose correctness is being estimated (the Target), allowing open-weight encoders to predict the performance of closed-source target models. We evaluate layerwise geometric probes, finding that Fisher Separability (J) effectively identifies informative layers, supported by Effective Dimensionality (d_eff) diagnostics. We then utilize a SharedTrunkNet, a joint multi-output MLP that predicts simultaneous correctness probabilities across candidate models using concatenated prefill features. In our experiments, SharedTrunkNet consistently outperforms semantic baselines. At its best, SharedTrunkNet closes 45.58% of the gap between the strongest standalone model and the oracle while achieving 74.31% cost savings relative to the most expensive model. These results demonstrate that prefill activations provide a robust routing signal, establishing mechanistic routing as a high-performance alternative to purely semantic selection.