Decomposing Evolutionary Mixture-of-LoRA Architectures: The Routing Lever, the Lifecycle Penalty, and a Substrate-Conditional Boundary

Abstract: We decompose an evolutionary mixture-of-LoRA system on a from-scratch ~150M-parameter widened-D substrate (D=1536, V=32000; D/V approx 0.048; the "widened-1536" substrate) into three factors -- a router rewrite (parallel sigmoid gate with learnable per-adapter floor and bounded temperature anneal, fed post-stack hidden states rather than token-embedding means), a per-domain leave-one-out evaluation scope, and a lifecycle of death plus alpha-blend inheritance plus SVD mutation plus slot reallocation -- and report a 5-of-8 partial 2^3 factorial run at n=3 seeds and 25000 adaptation steps per cell. The attribution chain is sharp on this substrate: the router rewrite carries the entire +0.0426 nat balanced log-PPL improvement (Delta = log PPL_ref - log PPL_test, positive = improvement; t=12.86, p=0.006) attributed to "the full evolutionary system vs the static B3 baseline"; the headline full-system-vs-B3 balanced contrast itself is +0.015 nats, t=1.94, p=0.19 at n=3 and does not clear alpha=0.05. The per-domain evaluation scope is null at seed-resolution, and the lifecycle is a net drag of approx -0.028 nats (t=-4.46,p=0.047 in the primary chain). An auxiliary alpha=0 inheritance counterfactual at n=3 seeds is sign-inconsistent at the headline metric and underpowered for either an equivalence or load-bearing conclusion (corrected from an earlier arithmetic-mean aggregator that erroneously cleared inheritance; see Appendix B.11). A base-perturbation probe directionally refutes a "genomic-context" reframe of the lifecycle role. A controllable synthetic sandbox locates a substrate-conditional regime boundary: evolutionary search on the routing channel is load-bearing only when adapters are pre-aligned to the task; in every other regime tested it underperforms, ties, or actively degrades the gradient solution.