When Prompts Hire Specialists: Why pMoE Changes Visual Adaptation Economics
Inspection cameras, pathology scanners, product catalog systems, and retail shelf analytics all create the same inconvenient problem: the image may look simple, but the knowledge needed to interpret it rarely comes from one source. A model trained on broad natural images may recognize general objects well. A contrastive model may separate fine visual categories better. A medical encoder may notice domain-specific patterns that a general model treats as visual noise. A segmentation-oriented model may understand spatial boundaries better than a classifier. Asking one backbone to cover all of this is elegant in a slide deck and occasionally foolish in production. Nature, sadly, did not optimize itself for clean model procurement. ...