Adaptive Routing

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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Period ending 2026-09-14

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245 papers

Latest in Adaptive Routing

Jun 20, 2026cs.LG

WiSP: A Working-Set View of Mixture-of-Experts Serving on Extremely Low-Resource Hardware

Modern local and agentic workloads often need large-model capacity at low concurrency, but run on GPUs that cannot keep a frontier-scale model resident. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are a natural fit because they activate only a small subset of experts per token, but their sparsity saves computation, not residency: the full expert pool still has to be stored, and any expert used by a layer must be in GPU memory when that layer runs. Static layer-level CPU offload makes such models fit, but transfers the expert layer in bulk on every forward pass, losing much of the sparsity advantage. We view low-resource MoE serving as a working-set problem on the GPU. Routed expert weights and the KV cache are two memory-demand streams competing for the same limited VRAM. We implement this view in WiSP (Working-Set Paging), a routing-aware expert pager that plugs into an unmodified serving engine and preserves byte-identical outputs. On a real 24 GiB RTX 3090, WiSP achieves up to 2.0x the decode throughput of static offload at the same memory budget when the model does not fit. A natural next step is to predict future experts and prefetch them. We find that this does not help in single-stream decode: the bottleneck is PCIe bandwidth, not prediction quality, so speculative transfers compete with demand transfers instead of hiding them. This shifts the design question from prefetching to allocation: how should one VRAM budget be divided between resident experts and the KV cache? We answer with MV-WSA (Marginal-Value Working-Set Allocation), which splits memory by marginal latency benefit per byte while enforcing a KV-admission floor. As a startup configurator, MV-WSA is the only policy we test that stays near-best on both prefill and decode; as a live controller, it resizes both pools while serving and reduces end-to-end time by up to 1.19x over a fixed offline split, without changing model outputs.
Jiamu Zhang, Liang Wu, Mayank Darbari +1
Jun 19, 2026cs.CL

Dissecting Agentic RAG: A Component Ablation for Multi-Hop QA with a Local 7B Model

Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine iterative reasoning loops, query decomposition, and adaptive retrieval to tackle multi-hop question answering. However, the contribution of each component remains poorly understood, particularly under resource-constrained settings using only local language models. Many agentic designs add adaptive retrieval routing and deeper retrieval loops on the assumption that the added complexity helps. To test whether it does, we run a controlled ablation study of a full agentic RAG pipeline evaluated on 5,000 questions from the HotpotQA distractor development set using a local 7B parameter model (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct). Our full pipeline achieves EM=53.2% and F1=61.6%, compared to a single-pass dense-retrieval baseline of EM=43.1% and F1=54.0%. Across eight ablation conditions, we find that: (1) fixed hybrid retrieval via reciprocal rank fusion consistently outperforms rule-based adaptive routing (+1.8 EM, +1.9 F1), as the routing heuristic over-routes to BM25 by firing on named entities present in nearly all multi-hop sub-questions; (2) two retrieval iterations over the decomposed sub-questions capture 95% of the gains of five, with no meaningful benefit from deeper loops; and (3) query decomposition and cross-encoder reranking each contribute statistically significant but smaller gains (p<0.01 and p<0.001 respectively). Taken together, on a fixed local-model budget, the simpler and fixed choices turn out to be competitive with or better than their adaptive versions: most of the gain comes from running a short retrieval loop, not from adaptive routing or from many iterations. We use no proprietary APIs or large-scale compute.
Sheroz Shaikh
Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Trip+: Benchmarking Agents in Personalized Interactive Travel Planning

Interactive travel planning has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are deployed to manage evolving preferences and unexpected disruptions over multiple turns. Such settings require models to make complex, profile-conditioned planning decisions. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate feasibility, personalization, or interaction in relatively isolated settings. We therefore introduce Trip+ to measure the ability of agents to plan travel holistically. In Trip+, given traveler profiles and dynamic interactions, agents must generate and revise minute-level itineraries. End-to-end traveler experiences are evaluated via an LLM-based simulator, enabling the assessment of subjective metrics like fatigue. Our scenarios range from simple request resolutions to complex environment-driven replanning. We evaluate 18 LMs and find a consistent gap in experiential quality. Models favor technically feasible but exhausting itineraries that diverge sharply from profiled traveler preferences.
Junle Chen, Wei Chen, Yehong Xu +6
Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines (0.6940.694 vs. 0.6470.647 and 0.640.64, p<0.001p<0.001). A/B testing (N=656N=656 conversations from 359 students) shows sim-to-real transfer where the model switches from analytical to scaffolding learning strategies. Our adaptive prompt selection mechanism improves instructional efficiency, maintains pedagogical quality and reduces interactions by around 3 turns (p=0.007p=0.007). While a greedy router achieves a comparable exercise conversion rate with the baseline (19.1%19.1\% vs. 19.6%19.6\%), a stochastic router that samples strategies leads to a higher conversion rate (28.1%28.1\%).
Po-Chin Chang, Nicholas Hogan, Aske Plaat +1
Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

Coupled Routing and Configuration Optimization for Multi-Viewpoint Robotic Inspection

We present a unified framework that turns a set of 6-DoF inspection viewpoints into a time-optimal, collision-free route for a 9-DoF robotic system. Unlike modular pipelines that fix a single inverse-kinematics (IK) configuration per viewpoint, build an all-pairs travel-time map, and then route, our method jointly optimizes the visiting order and the per-viewpoint configuration in a single global search. The three-dimensional self-motion manifold of each viewpoint is parameterized in closed form so that the pose constraint holds by construction, the rest-to-rest travel time is approximated by a closed-form admissible double-integrator surrogate, and the tour is encoded by random keys. A derivative-free optimizer (CMA-ES) minimizes a cheap penalized objective over order and configuration, after which direct-collocation trajectory optimization is applied only to the edges of the selected route to certify dynamic feasibility and torque limits, and to return exact timings. This reduces the trajectory solves from quadratic to linear in the number of viewpoints and removes the decoupling that prevents modular pipelines from being globally time-optimal. Simulations and real-robot experiments on a KUKA LBR iiwa with a 2-DoF linear stage validate feasibility, smooth execution, and reduced end-to-end inspection time relative to modular and naive distance-based baselines.
Minh Nhat Vu, Khang Nguyen, Vu Trung Tran +1
Jun 17, 2026cs.LG

RouteJudge: An Open Platform for Reproducible and Preference-Aware LLM Routing

We present RouteJudge, an online pairwise preference evaluation framework for LLM routing systems, with a public platform available at https://routejudge.cn. Different from model-level response evaluation, RouteJudge focuses on router-level decision quality. For each user query, multiple routing strategies independently recommend candidate models under the same model pool and budget constraints. The selected model responses are then presented to users through anonymous pairwise comparisons, and the resulting user preferences are attributed back to the routing strategies behind the compared responses. Each evaluation record stores the query, routing decisions, model responses, preference labels, cost, latency, and task metadata, enabling preference-aware, cost-aware, and task-conditioned analysis of LLM routers. To support the continuous expansion of routing methods in RouteJudge, we further release ORBIT (Optimal Routing and Budgeted Inference Toolbox), a modular and extensible toolbox that standardizes the end-to-end workflow of LLM routing. ORBIT provides unified interfaces for benchmark loading, query representation, router implementation, budget-aware evaluation, and method comparison, allowing researchers to develop and evaluate routing algorithms under consistent protocols. It also serves as the submission and integration layer for RouteJudge: researchers can implement routing methods within ORBIT, validate them on existing routing benchmarks, and submit compatible routers for online preference-based evaluation. The code of ORBIT is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-Model-Reuse/ORBIT.
Guannan Lai, Haoran Hu, Han-Jia Ye
Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

FairTutor: Equity-Aware Pedagogical LLM Routing for Budget-Constrained AI Tutoring

Generative AI tutors provide real-time, personalized learning support, but also create a new education inequity: students with access to premium AI services may receive clearer explanations, more personalized guidance, and better scaffolding than students limited to free or low-cost services. To address this challenge, we propose FairTutor, an equity-aware model-routing framework that achieves cost-effective AI tutoring via pedagogically motivated multi-agent orchestration. FairTutor combines query analysis, pedagogical planning, low-cost model generation, evaluator-guided critique and revision, and selective escalation to premium AI models. We introduce access-tier AI Education (AIED) Advantage Gap to measure the quality difference between premium-access and budget-constrained tutoring, and TutorAccessEval, a benchmark spanning math, reading, writing, science, and language learning. Empirical evaluations show that FairTutor achieves 97.1% of premium pedagogical quality (in floor-adjusted Likert scale) while reducing serving cost by 71.6%. Sensitivity analysis reveals a tunable cost--quality Pareto frontier, enabling FairTutor to be tailored to the needs of diverse student populations.
Qingyang Xu
Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

DecoSearch: Complexity-Aware Routing and Plan-Level Repair for Text-to-SQL

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in translating natural language to SQL, yet existing methods still falter on complex queries requiring multi-step, data-aware reasoning. We introduce DecoSearch, a training-free framework that addresses this by routing each query to the appropriate level of reasoning effort. A lightweight Schema Selector first prunes the full database schema to the relevant tables and columns. An LLM Judger then decides whether the question requires decomposition: straightforward questions follow a direct generation path and complex ones are escalated to a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of atomic sub-questions, each solved by a targeted SQL generation step. A RAG component grounds the decomposer with semantically similar training examples, and a Topology Refiner restructures the reasoning plan when execution failures signal a flawed decomposition rather than a fixable SQL error. DecoSearch achieves 70.53% execution accuracy on BIRD and 88.31% on Spider with a DeepSeek backbone, surpassing all training-free baselines while consuming an order of magnitude fewer tokens than competing methods. It also functions as a model-agnostic wrapper, consistently improving fine-tuned SQL generation backbones without any modification to the pipeline.
Esteban Schafir, Xu Zheng, Hojat Allah Salehi +4
Jun 16, 2026cs.CL

Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery

Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16--23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a \emph{retrieval} gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a \emph{confusion} gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10--11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10--17pp despite 10--15pp lower absolute performance.
Kellen Gillespie, Robyn Perry
Jun 15, 2026cs.CR

The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs

Agents increasingly access large language models (LLMs) through API routers. A router terminates the client's transport-layer security session and opens a separate upstream session, so it holds the full interaction in plaintext. This makes the router an application-layer man-in-the-middle: it can rewrite agent tool calls, swap dependencies for typosquatted packages, trigger attacks only under audit-evading conditions, and passively exfiltrate secrets. Existing client-side defenses are evadable. We propose AEGIS, a provider-transparent attested API router whose data path is a client-verified faithful passthrough. AEGISconfines plaintext handling to a small hardware-enclave component while leaving authentication, scheduling, accounting, and management on the untrusted host. The client verifies the enclave before releasing plaintext. The host can neither read nor alter the interaction, and plaintext leaves only toward destinations fixed by the measured image. We show that all four malicious-router attack classes succeed against a plaintext-access baseline and are blocked by AEGIS, including adaptive tests against the same boundary. The trusted path is 851851 lines, carries three provider-native APIs without conversion, and completes every request under real-provider workload and concurrency. In a seeded audit pilot, two commodity coding agents find eight and ten of ten planted invariant violations. The local relay overhead is about six milliseconds per request.
Sipeng Xie, Qianhong Wu, Hengrun Lu +4
Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.
Yifan Wang, Peiming Li, Shiyu Li +5
Jun 13, 2026cs.AI

ChatPlanner: A Large Language Model Framework for Personalized Public Transit Routing

Personalized public transit routing in public transit systems remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing and integrating diverse user preferences into routing algorithms. This paper presents ChatPlanner, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable preference aware public transit routing. Our approach employs fine-tuned LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract routing parameters and interpret nuanced user preferences from natural language queries, subsequently integrating these preferences into the objective function of a public transit routing algorithm. This study designs preference aware datasets incorporating eight personas and five contexts to establish scoring standards for both fine-tuning and RAG. This work conducted three experiments to validate the solutions' feasibility, extraction of routing information and preferences, and solution set quality and completeness. Results demonstrate that ChatPlanner generates feasible solutions reliably. Fine-tuning enforces the required output structure and learns general preference patterns, while RAG provides query-specific context to resolve imprecise or conversational expressions and calibrate continuous scores. The combination of both achieves the highest accuracy in routing information extraction and user preference interpretation. Results based on selected case studies show that by capturing user preferences, ChatPlanner identifies valuable solutions across different dimensions that existing route planners overlook, generating more valuable route alternatives. This research establishes a new paradigm for integrating natural language understanding into transportation optimization.
Tingting Yang, Chenhao Xue, Jun Chen
Jun 12, 2026cs.LG

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.
Herbert Woisetschläger, Arastun Mammadli, Ryan Zhang +1
Jun 11, 2026cs.DC

STREAM: Multi-Tier LLM Inference Middleware with Dual-Channel HPC Token Streaming

Researchers and practitioners working with large language models face a fragmented landscape: local models are free and private but hardware limits the model size and context windows a researcher can use; institutional HPC centers offer powerful GPU resources at no marginal cost and keep data within institutional boundaries, but operate behind firewalls and are designed for batch jobs rather than interactive use; commercial cloud APIs provide frontier-model quality on demand but impose significant cost and data retention policies unsuitable for sensitive research data. No existing system unifies all three. STREAM (Smart Tiered Routing Engine for AI Models) addresses this gap with four contributions: (1) a three-tier routing architecture combining local, HPC, and cloud inference with a local LLM-based complexity judge; (2) a dual-channel HPC streaming architecture that separates the Globus Compute control plane (authentication and job dispatch) from a WebSocket relay data plane (token delivery), enabling sub-second TTFT (0.54 s median, 21.1x over batch mode's 11.40 s) through institutional firewalls without VPN or firewall rule changes, with end-to-end AES-256-GCM encryption ensuring the relay operator cannot read token payloads; (3) tier-aware context summarization that prevents long conversations from forcing simple queries onto expensive tiers; and (4) an HPC-as-API proxy mode that exposes HPC inference as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint callable from any standard client with no HPC expertise, a deployment pattern made practical only by the sub-second TTFT of contribution (2). Llama 3.2 3B achieves 85.1% free-tier retention on a 1,200-query benchmark spanning ten domains. Measured TTFT: 0.26 s local, 0.54 s HPC (relay), 1.68 s cloud.
Anas Nassar, Steve Mohr, Leonard Apanasevich +1
Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

Brick: Spatial Capability Routing for the Mixture-of-Models (MoM) Paradigm

Defining query difficulty is one of the hardest problems in deployment engineering. Existing LLM routers rely on surface features such as domain labels, keywords, and token count, ignoring the within-domain variance that actually determines model success. Frontier models cost ten to one hundred times more than local open-weight models, so at production scale even small per-request savings become a direct cloud-bill lever. We present Brick, a multimodal router that scores each model on six capability dimensions, combines this with a per-query difficulty estimate, and dispatches via a cost-penalized geometric rule. A continuous preference knob lets operators slide between max-quality and max-saving profiles at deploy time. On a benchmark of 5,504 queries, Brick at max-quality reaches 76.98% accuracy, beating the best single model (75.02%) and all tested routers. At a neutral cost-quality profile, Brick achieves 74.11% accuracy at 4.71x lower cost than always using the strongest model. At min-cost, it cuts cost 22.15x with 11.85 points accuracy loss. Median latency drops from 51.2s to 22.8s.
Francesco Massa, Marco Cristofanilli
Jun 10, 2026cs.LG

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{ReCal}, a \textbf{\underline{Re}}ward \textbf{\underline{Cal}}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.
Qihang Yu, Hanwen Tong, Zhengqi Zhang +5
Jun 10, 2026cs.LG

TimeRouter: Efficient and Adaptive Routing of Time-Series Foundation Models

Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly explored as predictive experts within emerging agentic time-series systems. However, TSFMs exhibit heterogeneous inductive biases, and no single model consistently dominates across forecasting regimes, making expert selection a critical challenge. Existing systems often delegate this decision to LLM-based controllers, incurring substantial inference overhead. We present TimeRouter, an efficient routing framework that leverages empirical complementarity across a pool of pretrained TSFMs through lightweight discriminative routing, selective gating, and ensemble fallback. Concretely, TimeRouter combines a learned routing head, a selective gate, and an ensemble fallback, enabling adaptive expert selection without invoking an LLM at inference time. TimeRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GIFT-EVAL leaderboard, with an LB MASE of 0.6765. Beyond benchmark performance, our ablation studies provide empirical insights into TSFM routing design, highlighting the importance of pool composition and selective gating. Taken together, these results position TimeRouter as a modular and lightweight routing layer for future agentic time-series systems built upon foundation-model pools. Our code is available at https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TimeRouter.
Kanghui Ning, Yushan Jiang, Kashif Rasul +3
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routing

Existing LLM routing methods typically treat a model's single response to a query as its capability label for training routers. However, because LLM generation is inherently stochastic, such single-shot supervision provides only a noisy observation of a query-model pair's behavior rather than a reliable capability estimate. We show that this assumption introduces systematic noise into routing supervision, making learned routing policies less reliable. To address this issue, we propose DARS (Distribution-Aware Routing Supervision), a framework that constructs routing supervision from a distributional view of model behavior. Instead of relying on a single generated response, DARS considers uncertainty from both the input side and the output side, capturing how semantically equivalent query formulations and stochastic generations affect model performance. Based on these distribution-aware observations, DARS builds more reliable supervision signals for routing. Experiments across diverse tasks show that single-shot labels can be misleading for model selection, while distribution-aware supervision provides more stable labels and improves learned routing behavior. Our results suggest that reliable LLM routing should move beyond single-response observations and be grounded in query-level model capability distributions.
Guannan Lai, Haoran Hu, Long Chen +2
Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

ChronoForest: Closed-Loop Multi-Tree Diffusion Planning for Efficient Bridge Search and Route Composition

How can we plan long-horizon routes that reach designated goals, visit required waypoints, and remain short when only short-horizon offline trajectories are available? This problem matters in offline navigation because collecting sufficiently rich long-horizon data is difficult, yet real agents must still solve long-range tasks with route-level efficiency rather than mere feasibility. The difficulty is twofold: at the microscopic level, composing many short-horizon segments creates a trade-off between search cost and path quality, while at the macroscopic level, waypoint ordering requires comparing pairwise travel costs among start, goal, and waypoint anchors that are unknown before planning and increasingly unreliable when estimated only from long-range temporal distance. In this paper, we propose ChronoForest, a closed-loop planning system that couples local bridge search and online route re-solving through an anchor-chaining tree diffusion planner and an online multi-tree orchestrator. ChronoForest uses temporal distance for short-range guidance and node evaluation, while using search-time bridge evidence to validate long-range anchor connectivity and repeatedly re-solve the route. On OGBench AntMaze-Stitch, ChronoForest achieves 99.8%, 99.3%, and 99.5% success on the medium, large, and giant splits and improves giant-stitch success by up to 34.5 points over prior reported diffusion-based results. On Hamiltonian route-composition benchmarks, online re-solving corrects poor temporal orderings and improves route quality while remaining substantially cheaper than exhaustive planning.
Jungmin Seo, Jaesik Park
Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

You Only Index Once: Cross-Layer Sparse Attention with Shared Routing

Long-context inference in modern LLMs is increasingly constrained by decoding efficiency, especially in reasoning-heavy settings where models generate long intermediate chains of thought. Existing sparse attention methods often face a practical efficiency-quality trade-off. Structured block sparse methods typically provide stronger acceleration but incur noticeable quality loss, while token sparse methods are usually more accurate yet deliver limited end-to-end speedup because top-k routing over the full cache remains expensive. In this work, we propose cross-layer sparse attention (CLSA), which is built on top of KV-sharing architectures such as YOCO. The core idea is to share not only the KV cache across cross-decoder layers, but also the routing index. A single indexer computes token-level top-k selection once and reuses the resulting index across layers, thereby preserving the fine-grained selectivity of token sparse attention while amortizing the routing overhead. The resulting architecture improves all major inference bottlenecks jointly, including pre-filling, KV-cache storage, and long-context decoding. Experiments across short-context and long-context benchmarks show that CLSA is both accurate and efficient, achieving up to 7.6x decoding speedup and 17.1x overall throughput improvement at 128K context. These results suggest a more complete architectural solution for long-context LLMs that jointly advances model quality and inference efficiency.
Yutao Sun, Yanqi Zhang, Li Dong +2
Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

CLEAR: Cognition and Latent Evaluation for Adaptive Routing in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models often struggle to balance multi-modal maneuver generation with real-time inference constraints. While diffusion models successfully capture diverse driving behaviors, their iterative denoising process incurs unacceptable latency for safety-critical deployment. To address this, we propose CLEAR (Cognition and Latent Evaluation for Adaptive Routing), a framework that combines ultra-fast generative planning with deep semantic reasoning. CLEAR employs Drive-JEPA as the visual encoder and replaces the multi-step denoising chain with a single-step conditional drift in a VAE latent space, introducing a conditioning coefficient to balance diversity and expert precision. Meanwhile, we fully fine-tune Qwen3.50.8B on driving QA pairs to extract scene-aware hidden states. These states guide both an Adaptive Scheduler, which selects the conditioning coefficient αα and sample count NN from a discrete set of predefined schemes, and a cross-attention scorer that selects the optimal trajectory from candidates. On the NAVSIM v1 benchmark, CLEAR achieves a state-of-the-art PDMS of 93.7. Our results demonstrate that high-fidelity, multi-modal planning can be executed efficiently without dense geometric annotations or iterative sampling.
Yining Xing, Zehong Ke, Zhiyuan Liu +3
Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

Learning to Route LLMs from Implicit Cost-Performance Preferences via Meta-Learning

Large language models (LLMs) present a trade-off between performance and cost, where more powerful models incur greater expense. LLM routing aims to mitigate expenses while maintaining performance by sending queries to the most suitable model. However, existing methods cannot perform well for different user cost-performance preferences. To address this gap, we introduce a novel perceptive LLM routing paradigm for personalized and user-centric cost-performance optimization, which efficiently learns users' implicit preferences through little interaction. To handle the challenge of heterogeneous user needs, we formulate preference profiles as a set of distinct tasks in contextual bandit and propose MetaRouter, a meta-learning framework designed for preference-aware LLM routing. Experimental results show that MetaRouter outperforms strong baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks. Furthermore, it exhibits high efficiency in learning user preferences, robustness to changes in the routable LLMs, and scalability to multi-model routing.
Jiahao Zeng, Ming Tang, Ningning Ding
Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

IR3DE: A Linear Router for Large Language Models

Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate proficiency on a wide range of general tasks, and achieve remarkable results on various specialized tasks via domain-expert LLMs. With the ever-growing list of available LLMs, inference routers are being proposed to select the most appropriate LLM for each prompt. However, existing routing methods either optimize cost across weak-to-strong generalist LLMs or require substantial training to support domain-expertise routing. In this paper, we propose IR3DE, a Ridge Regression-based Router for Domain Experts that provides cheap and fast routing decisions for each prompt. We evaluate IR3DE in two Causal Language Modeling (CLM) settings where the tasks are next-token prediction for all domains, and one reasoning setting where each domain has its own distinct reasoning task. Despite being a linear router, IR3DE achieves performance comparable to the other baselines in both CLM settings, and surpassing them in the reasoning setting, with a normalized performance of 98.4%. Moreover, IR3DE enables the addition or removal of new domain experts without requiring the router to be retrained from scratch, allowing a dynamic set of LLMs to be served with minimal disruption to the router itself. Our code is available at: github.com/gensyn-ai/IR3DE.
Eros Fanì, Oğuzhan Ersoy
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

Consensus is Strategically Insufficient: Reasoning-Trace Disagreement as a Knowledge-Representation Signal

Multi-agent systems are commonly designed to reduce disagreement through voting, consensus protocols, debate, or fault-tolerant aggregation. We argue that this objective is insufficient for value-laden tasks, where disagreement may reflect genuine normative uncertainty rather than agent error. Building on prior work on reasoning-trace disagreement in human-AI collaborative moderation, we propose a knowledge-representation layer in which reasoning traces and agent decisions are abstracted into symbolic disagreement states. Given agents producing explicit reasoning traces and binary decisions, we distinguish four states according to reasoning similarity and conclusion agreement: convergent agreement, divergent agreement, convergent disagreement and divergent disagreement. These states support defeasible strategic routing rules. We instantiate the framework in content moderation and argue that disagreement-aware routing provides a bridge between sub-symbolic LLM deliberation and symbolic knowledge representation for multi-agent strategic reasoning.
Michał Wawer, Jarosław A. Chudziak
Jun 1, 2026cs.AI

RASER: Recoverability-Aware Selective Escalation Router for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Multi-hop question-answering systems often use expensive retrieval on every question. They may decompose the question, run several retrieval rounds, or search through bridge entities before answering. All of these strategies rely on repeated LLM calls to rewrite or decompose the question, which increases extra token cost, and it is not fitting when the LLM budget is tight. However, our analysis shows that lots of multi-hop questions are already answered correctly by a single one-shot RAG, so running an extra retrieval on every question wastes the budget. We introduce RASER (Recoverability-Aware Selective Escalation Router), a family of cheap routers built on one-shot RAG and six features from it. RASER-2 decides whether to stop or escalate to the extra-retrieval action PRUNE. RASER-3 chooses among one-shot RAG, PRUNE, and iterative retrieval IRCoT, using the same features but adding an explicit cost-accuracy trade-off. Neither router makes an extra LLM call to decide. Across six LLMs and three multi-hop QA benchmarks, both routers stay competitive with the other state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines in F1 while spending only 41-49% of always-prune's tokens and also less than the iterative and decomposition retrieval baselines.
Yuyang Li, Zihe Yan, Tobias Käfer
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

MASER: Modality-Adaptive Specialist Routing for Embodied 3D Spatial Intelligence

In 3D environments, Embodied Agents answer spatially relevant questions through reasoning from a mixture of modalities including natural language, RGB images, point clouds, depth maps and camera poses. Existing Vision-Language models (VLMs) are fine-tuned over a single modality. This completely ignores the question semantics which may favor a different modality than the finetuned modality. To address this, we propose MASER (Modality-Adaptive SpEcialist Routing), a lightweight framework that trains five different modality adapters of a shared VLM backbone and learns a neural routing policy that selects the best adapter based on the question during inference. We encode each question with a frozen sentence transformer and pass the embedding through a small Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) trained on oracle adapter-accuracy labels. We evaluate our methodology over the Open3D-VQA benchmark and our evaluations show that no single modality is universally optimal -- point-cloud answers are best in 51.5% of cases. MASER routes with 51.3% oracle agreement, outperforming a Random-Forest ablation (43.5%), with only a single adapter call per question.
Hilton Raj, Vishnuram AV
Jun 1, 2026cs.LG

Gate the Filter, Not the Message: Node-Channel Mixtures for Pre-Propagation GNNs

Pre-propagation graph neural networks (PPGNNs) push all graph-dependent computation into a preprocessing step and train only on the resulting dense hop features, which makes them highly scalable. A puzzle in this regime is that more complex hop aggregators do not reliably outperform simpler ones: on many benchmarks, a plain MLP-based aggregator matches or beats hop-attention variants. We revisit this behavior from a graph-filter perspective. Over a precomputed diffusion basis, existing PPGNNs differ mainly in how filter coefficients are shared across nodes and feature channels, rather than simply in raw aggregator capacity. MLP-based architectures learn channel-dependent filters that are largely shared across nodes, while hop-attention-based architectures learn node-dependent mixtures that are largely shared across channels. This reveals a missing regime in standard PPGNN designs: joint node- and channel-adaptive filtering under the pre-propagation computational contract. We propose FilterMoE, a mixture-of-experts PPGNN in which a small bank of learnable Chebyshev filter experts is routed jointly over nodes and channels by a 3D gating tensor. Across eleven homophilic and heterophilic benchmarks, FilterMoE outperforms strong PPGNN baselines on nine datasets and ranks first on all three large-scale benchmarks, improving the average test score by 1.53 points. These results establish joint node-channel filter routing as a robust alternative to dataset-specific hop-aggregator selection.
Zichao Yue, Zhiru Zhang
May 31, 2026cs.CV

Reusing Fusion-Time Spectral Reliability for Adaptive Fusion and Expert Routing in RGB-Infrared Object Detection

RGB-infrared detectors typically discard the statistics generated during cross-modal fusion, leaving downstream modules unaware of whether the current interaction is reliable. We propose to extract a parameter-free, 7-dimensional spectral reliability descriptor -- summarizing band energy, amplitude ratio, phase consistency, and cross-modal correlation -- and to reuse it beyond the fusion stage. The descriptor drives both Spectral Reliability Fusion (SRF), which gates a spectral residual against a conservative spatial base, and Reliability-Conditioned Expert Routing (RCER), which combines the descriptor with pooled content to steer sparse post-fusion experts. Under matched ablations, descriptor-aware gating improves mAP50 over content-only adaptive gating; a 2×22{\times}2 factorial analysis further shows that descriptor-conditioned routing provides the larger marginal gain over expert architecture alone at near-equal parameter count. Under six synthetic degradations on DroneVehicle, average retention rises to 95.0%, versus 92.0% for content-only MoE and 87.9% for concatenation, with the largest gain under modality drop; the same model also improves mAP50 by +5.2/+5.3 on the natural day/night split. These results suggest that preserving fusion-time reliability as an explicit signal benefits both adaptive fusion and post-fusion conditional computation.
Yefeng Wu
May 31, 2026cs.LG

MViewRouter: Internalizing Geometric Equivariance via Multi-view Alternating Attention for Combinatorial Routing

Combinatorial routing problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) are fundamental NP-hard problems with broad real-world applications. While recent deep reinforcement learning methods have shown promising performance, they typically handle geometric symmetries only through data augmentation, resulting in inconsistent decisions and limited generalization. To address this issue, we propose MViewRouter, a multi-view framework that internalizes geometric equivariance as a structural inductive bias to achieve invariant decision-making across routing problem variants. Our approach introduces a Multi-view Alternating Attention (MAA) mechanism that enables parallel processing over the D4D_4 symmetry group, alternating between intra-view relational modeling and inter-view feature alignment. Furthermore, we optimize the policy via Collective Policy Gradient Aggregation (CPGA), leveraging consensus gradients from multiple symmetric views to stabilize training and accelerate convergence. Experiments on TSP and CVRP benchmarks, as well as real-world TSPLIB instances, demonstrate that MViewRouter achieves competitive solution quality and strong zero-shot generalization.
Shiyan Liu, Bohan Tan, Yaoxin Wu +1
May 31, 2026cs.CR

SS-ZKR: Spatial-Semantic Zero-Knowledge Routing for Privacy-Preserving Multi-Agent Collaboration

Foundational agent interoperability standards, notably the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), have advanced multi-agent system communication, and complementary identity frameworks leveraging W3C Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) provide cryptographic agent authentication. However, no existing protocol supports content-based semantic routing of agent payloads across organisational trust boundaries without requiring the routing intermediary to decrypt the payload, which is a hard constraint in compliance-sensitive environments governed by GDPR, HIPAA, and MiFID II. We propose SS-ZKR, a three-mechanism privacy-preserving routing protocol designed as a complementary layer atop A2A/MCP. Mechanism I introduces blind routing via differentially private semantic intent vectors cryptographically bound to zero-knowledge proofs of payload-schema consistency. Mechanism II offers vector-weighted adaptive payload sanitisation with formal (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy for numerical fields and heuristic semantic aggregation for textual fields. Mechanism III presents a spatial-to-cryptographic policy compiler that translates visually defined trust-zone topologies into deterministic zero-knowledge access circuits. We provide a formal threat model, analyse information leakage bounds of intent vectors, present pseudocode for all three mechanisms, and give analytical complexity comparisons against TEE-based and homomorphic encryption-based routing baselines. SS-ZKR lets enterprises in financial services, healthcare, and defence orchestrate heterogeneous AI agents across regulatory boundaries without exposing proprietary data to routing infrastructure.
Hassan Touheed
May 29, 2026cs.LG

PR2: Predictive Routing Replay for MoE-Based LLM Reinforcement Learning

Mixture of Experts (MoE) Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance at scale. However, reinforcement learning (RL) on MoE-based LLMs often suffers from training instability. A root cause is router drift, i.e., expert activations can change drastically across model updates and differ between disaggregated rollout and training phases, causing large rollout--training mismatch and unstable importance sampling weights in PPO-style RL algorithms. Routing replay mitigates this issue by freezing the replay route within each reasoning trajectory, but it ignores how the router evolves under off-policy updates and thus causes router staleness. To address this limitation, we propose Predictive Routing Replay (PR2), which augments each router with a lightweight evolution predictor that learns to anticipate short-horizon router evolution. During the rollout phase, we use the predictive routing distribution to apply top-kk routing, enabling gradients to reach experts that are likely to become active after updates. During the training phase, we replay the resulting predicted route to retain consistency for stable importance estimation. Theoretical analysis and experiments support that PR2 reduces routing-induced mismatch, improves RL stability, and yields stronger performance across various reasoning benchmarks.
Daize Dong, Junlin Chen, Haolong Jia +9
May 29, 2026cs.LG

OrcaRouter: A Production-Oriented LLM Router with Hybrid Offline-Online Learning

The rapid development of large language models, each with distinct capabilities and inference costs, raises a practical deployment question: given an incoming request, which model should handle it? We present OrcaRouter, a production-oriented LLM router that combines a LinUCB-based contextual bandit over lexical and sentence-embedding features with a hybrid offline-online learning protocol. Offline, OrcaRouter obtains full-information feedback by evaluating each candidate model on a curated set of routing prompts, yielding a reward matrix used to fit one ridge regressor per arm. At deployment time, it initializes from these parameters and can optionally continue learning from bandit feedback, updating only the selected model's arm after observing its reward. At the time of our RouterArena submission (May 20, 2026), OrcaRouter-Adaptive ranked second on the public RouterArena leaderboard with an arena score of 72.08, achieving 75.54% accuracy at a cost of USD 1.00 per 1,000 queries.
Zhenghua Bao, Fengya Tian, Chris Zhang +3
May 28, 2026cs.CR

CacheProbe: Auditing Prompt Cache Isolation in Gateway APIs

Over the past year, prompt caching in Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly more popular across inference APIs. Prompt caching helps save precious compute resources and speeds up response times by reusing parts of the KV cache of a specific prompt for another request. However, many implementations of prompt caching are not secure against timing attacks or even basic metadata disclosure. Gu et al. (ICML 2025) develop a method to audit prompt caching in LLMs. This paper investigates whether OpenRouter's API gateway architecture introduces prompt caching vulnerabilities that bypass provider-level prompt cache isolation guarantees. Most LLM inference providers implement per-account or per-organization prompt caching to prevent data leaks, but does routing through OpenRouter with shared organizational credentials inadvertently create global cache sharing across all OpenRouter users?
Ryan Fahey
May 28, 2026cs.AI

Rubric-Guided Process Reward for Stepwise Model Routing

Stepwise model routing improves the efficiency of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) by assigning each reasoning step to a suitable model. Recent methods formulate routing as a sequential decision process and train the router with reinforcement learning. However, although they model routing as a process, they still supervise the router with outcome rewards. Such rewards only reflect final answer correctness and fail to evaluate intermediate routing decisions, which can weaken performance and generalization. To address this gap, we propose RoRo, a rubric-guided process reward framework for stepwise model routing. RoRo first collects diverse routing trajectories and constructs preference pairs based on outcome, cost, and process quality. It then trains a Rubricor to generate a query-specific evaluation rubric and a Judge to score routing trajectories under this rubric through alternating optimization. The resulting process rewards are combined with outcome rewards to optimize the routing policy via GRPO. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks under both same-family and cross-family settings show that RoRo consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves better accuracy and cost trade-offs.
Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Zhengheng Li +2
May 27, 2026cs.LG

The Routing Plateau: Understanding and Breaking the Accuracy Limits of LLM Routers

LLM routing has become a popular approach to improve the cost-quality trade-off of LLM services by dynamically selecting a model for each query. Recent work has explored a broad range of routing methods, including clustering-based routers, learned classifiers, pairwise ranking, and confidence-based approaches. Our extensive study of 21 routing methods across five benchmarks reveals a consistent phenomenon that we call the routing plateau: many methods, including kNN, achieve very similar accuracy and converge to a narrow performance range that remains far below the oracle router. Our investigation shows that the plateau is largely caused by a predictability bottleneck: current routers mainly learn global averaged model-performance trends rather than fine-grained query-specific routing signals. As a result, they solve overlapping easy queries but collectively fail on hard queries that require instance-specific routing decisions. We further study how to move beyond the plateau and find that larger training datasets, stronger encoders, and end-to-end fine-tuning can further improve routing accuracy. These findings characterize the common limits of current routing methods and provide insights and actionable directions for the community to build more effective routing systems.
Yifan Lu, Qiyue Zhang, Shenrun Zhang +4
May 27, 2026cs.AI

SwarmHarness: Skill-Based Task Routing via Decentralized Incentive-Aligned AI Agent Networks

Vast quantities of compute (GPU cycles on personal workstations, idle inference servers, and edge devices between jobs) go unused because no incentive-aligned protocol exists for their owners to share them safely and profitably. Existing approaches either require a trusted central coordinator (cloud marketplaces), demand heavy blockchain infrastructure (Golem, BrokerChain), or lack an incentive layer entirely (BOINC, Petals). We propose SwarmHarness, a decentralised protocol in which HarnessAPI skill nodes self-organise into a compute swarm without any central authority. SwarmHarness has three interlocking components: a SwarmRegistry built on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for peer discovery and capability advertisement; a SwarmRouter that dispatches tasks to nodes using a utility function over capability, load, latency, and trust; and SwarmCredit, an incentive mechanism that attributes compute-credit rewards to contributing nodes via a Shapley-value approximation. Nodes earn credits by serving tasks and spend credits to submit them; idle nodes that never contribute drain credits and lose routing priority, creating a self-regulating participation economy. As nodes specialise toward high-reward skills and routing signals act as digital pheromones, the network exhibits emergent collective intelligence analogous to biological swarms. Beyond compute sharing, SwarmHarness is a foundational primitive for autonomous distributed AI agent networks in which agents hire compute, route subtasks, and settle credits without human intermediation.
Edwin Jose
May 27, 2026cs.CL

Routing-Aligned Fine-Tuning for Multilingual Downstream Tasks in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a dominant paradigm for efficient LLM scaling, yet adapting them to non-English downstream tasks remains challenging. Existing fine-tuning approaches treat MoE models as monolithic learners, ignoring the heterogeneous routing structure that develops during pretraining. We validate across multiple MoE models and downstream tasks that middle layers form a language-universal alignment zone where routing divergence strongly predicts per-language task performance gaps. Building on this observation, we propose RA-MoE (Routing-Aligned MoE Fine-Tuning), a three-stage framework that categorizes parallel task examples into a four-way taxonomy (cc/ci/ic/ii) based on correctness in English and the target language, identifies task-relevant experts in the middle layers, and augments standard SFT with a routing alignment loss that encourages target-language routing on ci-type examples to follow the English task-expert activation pattern. Experiments across three MoE models, three tasks, and six target languages demonstrate that RA-MoE consistently outperforms standard SFT and strong baselines including Routing Steering and RISE, with the ci proportion of a task-language pair serving as a reliable predictor of alignment benefit.
Guanzhi Deng, Kuan Wu, Haibo Wang +3
May 26, 2026cs.CV

PARE: Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient Video Generation

Video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) generate high-quality videos but demand substantial compute due to wide blocks, deep architectures, and iterative sampling. Recent methods reduce cost by compressing width, depth, or sampling steps, but typically commit to a fixed architecture that cannot adapt to individual inputs or denoising stages. We propose PARE (Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient video generation), which jointly compresses width and depth with structure-aware pruning and input-adaptive routing. For width, we observe that attention heads specialize into spatial and temporal roles, and design importance scoring that accounts for this distinction to prevent motion-critical temporal heads from being pruned prematurely. For depth, we train a lightweight router conditioned on denoising timestep and visual content to dynamically select which blocks to execute at each step, enabling per-input compute adaptation rather than static block removal. A progressive pipeline first recovers width-pruned quality via distillation, then jointly optimizes the student and router to decouple the two learning objectives. Experiments on Wan2.1-14B for both image-to-video and text-to-video generation show that PARE substantially reduces per-step computation while preserving quality across VBench dimensions, and composes with step distillation for further acceleration.
Yutong Wang, Yunke Wang, Tianfan Xue +4
May 26, 2026cs.CR

Grounded Cache Routing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: When Is It Safe to Reuse an Answer?

Modern retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) deployments increasingly rely on caching to reduce token cost and time-to-first-token(TTFT). Prefix-level KV reuse is now standard in serving stacks such as vLLM, and chunk-level and position-independent reuse have been pushed further by recent systems(RAGCache, TurboRAG, CacheBlend, EPIC, ContextPilot, PCR, LMCache). Output-level semantic answer caches, by contrast, remain fragile: similar prompts can map to different correct answers, retrieved evidence drifts as the corpus is updated, and adversarial collision attacks have been shown to hijack cached responses. We argue that the right framing for cached answer reuse is not how to reuse faster but when reuse is safe. We propose GroundedCache, an evidence-validated cache router that admits a cached answer only when 4 cheap gates simultaneously hold: query similarity, retrieved-evidence overlap, source-version validity, and lexical (or judge-based) support of the cached answer by the freshly retrieved evidence. We build a six-regime workload that stress-tests cache safety rather than only hit rate, and introduce an operator-facing metric, the unsafe-served rate (USR), fraction of all queries that received a wrong cached answer. Across 2 datasets and 12,000 real-LLM generations(Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on vLLM with Automatic Prefix Caching), GroundedCache drives USR to 0.0% on every HotpotQA regime(vs. 15-35% under naive caching) and to 1.5% on mtRAG document drift(vs. 51.5%), a 34x reduction on the design-point adversarial regime and 3-10x reductions across the other mtRAG regimes, while end-to-end p50 latency stays within 1.04-1.07x of a no-cache RAG baseline. A per-gate ablation isolates the lexical support gate as the load-bearing safety mechanism on both datasets, with the remaining gates providing defense-in-depth at near-zero cost. We release the implementation, workload, and evaluation harness.
Syed Huma Shah
May 25, 2026cs.AI

D2D^2-Monitor: Dynamic Safety Monitoring for Diffusion LLMs via Hesitation-Aware Routing

Despite the emergence of diffusion large language models (D-LLMs) as an alternative to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), safety monitoring for D-LLMs remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR-LLMs, D-LLMs generate text through a multi-step denoising process, exposing intermediate hidden representations that may contain safety-relevant information unavailable in standard single-step monitoring setups. Motivated by the suitability of lightweight probes for always-on monitoring, we analyze which trajectory-level signals best indicate when such probes are likely to struggle. We find that the most informative signal is safety hesitation: intermediate hidden states repeatedly falling within a small margin of the probe's decision boundary. The number of such hesitation steps in D-LLM's trajectory predicts probe failure effectively, providing a proxy of sample difficulty. Building on this analysis, we propose D2D^2-Monitor, a bi-level safety monitor for D-LLMs. D2D^2-Monitor adopts a lightweight probe as an always-on monitor to jointly estimate hesitation and perform base classification. When the hesitation level exceeds a threshold, a more expressive but computationally heavier probe is activated. This dynamic routing mechanism allocates monitoring resources efficiently at test time. Evaluated on 3 datasets (WildguardMix, ToxicChat, OpenAI-Moderation) across 4 D-LLMs, D2D^2-Monitor achieves state-of-the-art performance with a compact parameter footprint (\leq 0.85M parameters), and exhibits the best trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency relative to 8 baselines.
Aoxi Liu, Yupeng Chen, James Oldfield +5
May 25, 2026cs.DC

Neural Router: Semantic Content Matching for Agentic AI

Large language models (LLMs) can serve as the semantic-matching engine of a content-based publish/subscribe broker for agentic AI across the edge-cloud computing continuum, bridging the vocabulary and modality gaps that defeat keyword and embedding filters. Framed as offline multi-label retrieval over three public datasets spanning social-media, legal, and smart-home sensor domains (six LLMs, seven baselines), our central contribution is a two-crossover cost-accuracy characterisation: an analytical context-window crossover below which a CoverAndMerge compression pipeline reduces LLM invocations, and an empirical discrimination-capacity crossover above which matching accuracy collapses independently of context budget, by a model-dependent factor of parameter count and training generation. Two findings carry practical weight: above the discrimination crossover, compression cannot recover accuracy and only frontier-scale models clear large subscription sets; and there backend choice dominates configuration choice, so model selection, not pipeline tuning, is the primary operator lever. We accompany this with three composable algorithms and a per-cluster Quality-of-Experience framework for autonomic LLM-tier selection.
Lauri Lovén, Abhishek Kumar, Alexander Engelhardt +5
May 25, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching

Optimizing the trade-off among predictive performance and computational cost is a central focus in the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current routing methods primarily rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, making them susceptible to the memorization trap and leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this paper, we propose DecoR, a novel routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs, effectively mitigating the memorization trap. To enhance matching accuracy, we introduce a query capability deconstruction method that decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements, directing matching toward capability dimensions to ground decisions in essential task attributes. Furthermore, we develop CodaSet, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing routing generalization, where experimental results demonstrate that DecoR maintains superior accuracy while substantially lowering inference costs across both in-distribution and OOD settings. All the codes and data are available at https://github.com/lvbotenbest/DecoR.
Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun
May 25, 2026cs.LG

SeqRoute: Global Budget-Aware Sequential LLM Routing via Offline Reinforcement Learning

Existing LLM routing frameworks treat queries as independent events, neglecting the sequential nature of real-world user sessions constrained by global computational budgets. This mismatch inevitably leads to budget bankruptcy: myopic routing policies exhaust resources on early interactions, forcing subsequent and often more complex queries onto inadequate models. We introduce SeqRoute, a framework that formulates multi-turn routing as a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process and solves it via offline reinforcement learning. By incorporating the remaining budget into the state space and training with Conservative Q-Learning (CQL), SeqRoute learns delayed gratification to strategically preserve resources for high-stakes turns later in the session. To overcome data starvation, we propose Hindsight Budget Relabeling (HBR). This technique retrospectively simulates historical trajectories under diverse hypothetical budgets, expanding 10,000 raw sessions into 2.38 million transitions enriched with critical bankruptcy signals. At deployment, a dynamic λλ-sweep mechanism enables zero-shot navigation of the cost-quality Pareto frontier without retraining. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SeqRoute reduces operational costs by 6.0-73.5% while maintaining or improving quality, and suppresses bankruptcy rates to under 1%, strictly dominating behavior cloning, budget-aware heuristics, and static baselines across the entire Pareto frontier.
Zhongling Xu, Shunan Zheng, Wei Wang
May 25, 2026cs.CL

Learning to Route Languages for Multilingual Policy Optimization

Large language models~(LLMs) are trained on heterogeneous multilingual corpora, yet existing policy optimization methods often implicitly restrict each training question to a single response language or rely on a fixed dominant language for supervision. We propose language-routed policy optimization (LRPO), an online policy optimization framework that treats language as a selectable variable. LRPO elicits multilingual rollouts for each training question and integrates their relative quality into preference-based policy updates, increasing the diversity and informativeness of training signals under the fixed rollout budget. To adaptively determine which languages to explore during reinforcement learning, we introduce a trainable language router formulated as a multi-armed bandit, balancing exploration of underutilized languages with exploitation of more informative ones. Extensive experiments show that LRPO consistently improves multilingual performance, demonstrating that adaptive language routing enables effective cross-lingual knowledge exploitation for training. We release all the resources at https://github.com/Guochry/LRPO.
Geyang Guo, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji +2
May 22, 2026cs.AI

Safety-Oriented Routing Analysis of Mixtral MoE Under Benign and Harmful Prompts

Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models activate only a small subset of parameters for each token, making router behavior a central part of model computation. This paper studies routing behavior of Mixtral 8x7B-Instruct under benign and harmful prompts using two complementary signals: activation-based routing scores derived from expert selection frequencies and gradient-based scores derived from router-gate sensitivities. We analyze expert- and layer-level routing behavior and conduct expert-suppression interventions. The results show that activation-based expert usage is broad and long-tailed, whereas gradient-based importance is concentrated. At expert level, benign and harmful prompt groups remain close under both signals with modest separation. At layer level, activation-based routing is most selective around layers 8-15, while gradient-based importance is concentrated in final layers. Expert classification shows most experts are shared across benign and harmful prompts, though a limited subset shows clear group preference. Top-ranked expert sets show stronger benign-malicious overlap under gradient scores than activation scores, suggesting concentration on a common late-layer expert set. In intervention experiments, suppressing top five benign-dominant experts from activation scores reduces restricted responses from 24 to 14 over 100 prompts, while suppressing gradient-derived experts reduces them from 34 to 22 with fewer unintended reversals. Overall, safety-relevant routing in Mixtral is subtle, depth-dependent, and distributed rather than dominated by a fixed set of experts.
Md Nurul Absar Siddiky
May 22, 2026math.OC

Selective Ambulance Dispatch Under Contextual Travel-Time Uncertainty

Ambulance response is time-critical in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), where dispatchers must balance timely arrivals with limited fleet capacity. Static territories and deterministic travel-time estimates are vulnerable to dynamic congestion, while always-dual dispatch adds redundancy but consumes fleet capacity. We propose IDEAL (Intelligent Dual dispatch of Emergency AmbuLances), a selective dual-dispatch framework that sends a second ambulance only when the optimistic gap between primary and secondary paths exceeds a threshold. IDEAL learns context-specific edge travel times from trip-level dispatch records, including unobserved routes, using a weakly supervised bilevel representation network. We train the nonsmooth model with mini-batch conservative gradients and prove an asymptotic convergence guarantee. IDEAL models uncertainty via Burg-divergence perturbations to a shared metric in the learned representation space, thereby inducing correlated changes in edge travel times and learning context-specific radii from historical underprediction errors. For real-time decisions, IDEAL casts optimistic-gap computation as a difference-of-convex program and derives an efficient oracle with complexity guarantees. In collaboration with the Hong Kong Fire Services Department, we evaluate IDEAL using historical OHCA records and real-time adaptive simulations. The results achieve a stronger response-time/resource trade-off relative to all region-based and Google-based baselines.
Zikun Lin, Daniel Zhuoyu Long, Viet Anh Nguyen
May 21, 2026cs.LG

ModeSwitch-LLM: A Lightweight Phase-Aware Controller for Cross-Mode LLM Inference on a Single GPU

ModeSwitch-LLM is a lightweight request-boundary controller for improving single-GPU large language model inference efficiency by routing each request to an appropriate fixed inference mode. Instead of relying on one static serving configuration, the system selects among FP16, quantized modes, speculative decoding, and hybrid modes such as GPTQ plus prefix caching and INT8 plus continuous batching using cheap workload-level features. We evaluate ModeSwitch-LLM on Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct served on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. On deployment-style synthetic workloads, the online controller achieves a 2.10x mean latency speedup over FP16 and a 0.48x mean energy ratio, corresponding to 51.7% lower energy per token. On automatic benchmarks used as a quality gate, accuracy remains close to FP16 with a mean delta of +0.17 percentage points. We also evaluate lightweight learned routers, but find that they do not clearly outperform the rule-based controller because they add routing overhead and more often select modes that violate quality, energy, or memory constraints. These results show that simple request-aware routing can recover substantial efficiency from existing inference modes without retraining the model or changing its architecture.
Aman Sunesh, Ali Alshehhi, Hivansh Dhakne
May 21, 2026cs.CL

TransitLM: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Map-Free Transit Route Generation

Public transit route planning traditionally depends on structured map infrastructure and complex routing engines, and no existing dataset supports training models to bypass this dependency. We present TransitLM, a large-scale dataset of over 13 million transit route planning records from four Chinese cities covering 120,845 stations and 13,666 lines, released as a continual pre-training corpus and benchmark data for three evaluation tasks with complementary metrics. Experiments show that an LLM trained on TransitLM produces structurally valid routes at high accuracy and implicitly grounds arbitrary GPS coordinates to appropriate stations without any explicit mapping. These results demonstrate that transit route planning can be learned entirely from data, enabling end-to-end, map-free route generation directly from origin-destination information. The dataset and benchmark are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/GD-ML/TransitLM, with evaluation code at https://github.com/HotTricker/TransitLM.
Hanyu Guo, Jiedong Yang, Chao Chen +3
May 18, 2026cs.LG

LogRouter: Adaptive Two-Level LLM Routing for Log Question Answering in Big Data Systems

Production log analytics in self-hosted, resource-constrained environments requires natural-language access to massive log streams without the cost of routing every query through a large language model. We present LogRouter, an end-to-end log question-answering system deployed on TUBITAK BILGEM's national big data platform that combines a PySpark-based Drain3 ingestion pipeline, GPU-accelerated embeddings, and dual-index storage in Apache Druid and PostgreSQL with pgvector. A two-level cost-aware router dispatches each query along one of four execution paths: direct response, Druid keyword search, template lookup with SQL generation, and pgvector semantic retrieval, while a Level-2 router selects either a 14B-class or 32B-class generator for the semantic path. A dedicated coder LLM handles text-to-SQL generation. We evaluate the system on four LogHub datasets (Linux, Apache, Windows, and Mac; 70 questions in total) under both an online full-pipeline configuration and an offline configuration that isolates the generator. The router reaches 88.4% mean accuracy across datasets and 94.7% on Linux, while the full pipeline attains a mean ROUGE-1 of 0.373, BERTScore of 0.879, RAGAS Faithfulness of 0.779, and an end-to-end latency of 18.6 s. In an apples-to-apples offline comparison, the routed system reduces mean latency by 55% versus a Fixed-32B baseline (46.3 s vs. 102.1 s) while preserving Answer Correctness within 5.8 points and exceeding a Fixed-14B baseline on RAGAS Faithfulness across every dataset. Cost-aware dispatching is therefore a practical mechanism for production log QA: routing recovers most of the quality of an always-32B configuration at less than half the latency, and the L1 keyword vocabulary makes that routing decision with high precision without a learned classifier.
Mert Coskuner, Merve Zeybel, Melik Mert Dolan
May 17, 2026cs.CV

Stable Routing for Mixture-of-Experts in Class-Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) requires models to learn new classes sequentially while preserving prior knowledge. Recently, approaches that combine pre-trained models with mixture-of-experts (MoE) have received increasing attention in CIL: they typically expand experts during learning and employ a router to assign weights across experts. However, existing MoE methods often overlook routing drift induced by expert expansion. Once new experts are introduced, the router may reassign samples from earlier classes to newly added experts, thereby perturbing previously established expert compositions and causing interference even when old experts remain frozen. We argue that expandable MoE in CIL requires two complementary properties: stable old-class routing for knowledge preservation and sufficient capacity utilization for new-class adaptation. To this end, we propose Stable Routing for MoE (StaR-MoE), a routing-level framework for expandable MoE in CIL. By incorporating sensitivity-aware routing alignment, StaR-MoE aligns current old-class routing behavior with historical routing distributions through sensitivity-guided constraints. Complementarily, StaR-MoE introduces asymmetric capacity regularization to encourage effective utilization of the expanded expert pool without compromising class-specific routing specialization. Extensive experiments across four standard CIL benchmarks demonstrate that StaR-MoE consistently improves both average and last accuracy over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the importance of stable routing.
Zirui Guo, Quan Cheng, Da-Wei Zhou +1
May 16, 2026cs.CL

HyDRA: Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture for Heterogeneous LLM Pools

Production LLM deployments increasingly maintain heterogeneous model pools spanning order-of-magnitude cost differences. Existing routers make binary strong-vs-weak decisions and couple learned parameters to specific model identities, requiring retraining whenever the catalog changes. We present HyDRA (Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture), a framework that predicts fine-grained, multi-dimensional capability requirements per query and matches them against configuration-defined model profiles via shortfall matching. A ModernBERT encoder with K=4 independent sigmoid heads scores each query along reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use; a shortfall-matching algorithm then selects the cheapest model whose capabilities meet the predicted requirements. The deployed predictor runs at 86 ms median CPU inference latency in production, and is fully decoupled from the model catalog -- adding or removing models requires only a configuration change, with zero retraining. On SWE-Bench Verified (5-model pool: GPT-5.4-mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.3 Codex, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4), HyDRA's tunable shortfall threshold spans three regimes: peak-quality exceeds the always-strong Claude Sonnet 4.6 baseline (75.4% vs. 74.2% resolution) at 12.9% cost savings; iso-quality matches Sonnet at 54.1% cost savings, a 6x improvement over our prior in-house binary router at 9.1%; aggressive pushes savings to 72.5% for a 3.2-point quality trade. Results generalize across LiveCodeBench, BigCodeBench, and tau-bench. HyDRA is deployed to all users in GitHub Copilot's VS Code Chat auto-mode and -- to our knowledge for the first time in the LLM routing literature -- demonstrates language-invariant routing across CJK, European, and other script families.
Aashna Garg, Siddharth Singha Roy, Jinu Jang +2
May 15, 2026cs.LG

R2V Agent: Teaching SLMs When to Ask for Help

Efficient agentic systems should incur expensive frontier-model costs only on decisions where a cheaper local model is likely to fail. Existing LLM cascades usually route whole queries before execution, but task difficulty shifts mid-trajectory - after flaky tool calls, truncated observations, or compounding local errors - making pre-execution routing brittle. We introduce \textbf{R2V-Agent}, a risk-calibrated SLM-LLM routing framework for interactive agents. R2V combines four components: a distilled small language model (SLM) policy, a stronger teacher LLM, a lightweight process verifier that scores candidate actions at each step, and a calibrated step-level router. The router is our central contribution: after the SLM is trained, it estimates residual failure risk at each step and escalates only when teacher intervention is warranted. To make the routing problem well-defined, we first train a stable local SLM using a standard offline pipeline: behavioral cloning (BC) on teacher trajectories, followed by verifier-guided Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with consistency regularization. The router is then trained on this fixed policy's residual failures using Brier-calibrated probability estimation and a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)-constrained objective that penalizes worst-case failures across perturbation seeds. Across HumanEval+, TextWorld, and TerminalBench with four SLM backbones, R2V improves the reliability-cost frontier: it achieves 94.3%94.3\% HumanEval+ success with 0.60%0.60\% LLM escalation, recovers TextWorld from 64.6%64.6\% SLM-only success to 98.2%98.2\% at 41.7%41.7\% escalation, and reaches 93.3%93.3\% TerminalBench success at 33.9%33.9\% LLM calls, roughly half the heuristic-router cost.
Raghu Vamshi Hemadri, Humaira Firdowse Mohammed, Rishabh Maheshwary +5
May 15, 2026cs.NI

Optimization-as-a-Service via Multi-Agent Large Language Model for Radio Access Networks

The physical resource block (PRB) allocation in Radio Access Networks (RANs) traditionally relies on case-by-case manual problem construction or, more recently, learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) methods. However, the sixth-generation (6G) RAN environments confront unprecedented service diversity and exponential dynamics, featuring volatile fluctuations in active base stations (BSs), user scale, and stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Faced with such conditions, both manual models and standard AI algorithms remain fundamentally rigid, lacking the flexibility to adapt and self-evolve. To provide a one-size-fits-all solution, we propose treating the PRB allocation problem as an Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS) provided by a large language model multi-agent (LLM-MA) system. This fundamentally reshapes RAN resource allocation by utilizing agents to dynamically construct optimization problems and automatically determine objectives tailored to real-time scenarios. Our closed-loop architecture, integrating scene understanding, objective generation, solver, and reflection agents, enables context-aware, self-correcting formulation. To eliminate the computational latency of iterative reflection, we introduce a one-shot reflection distillation mechanism, training a lightweight student model to directly predict refined objective parameters. We theoretically bound the performance gap of this one-shot policy. Experimental results demonstrate our framework achieves near-optimal resource allocation with ultra-low inference latency.
Chaoqun You, Yueyue Dai, Xingqiu He +3
May 14, 2026cs.LG

TwinRouterBench: Fast Static and Live Dynamic Evaluation for Realistic Agentic LLM Routing

LLM routing matters most in long-horizon applications such as coding agents, deep research systems, and computer-use agents, where a single user request triggers many model calls. Routing each call to the cheapest sufficient model can cut costs without sacrificing quality, yet existing router benchmarks evaluate routers only on one-shot prompts. They never expose the router-visible prefix at an intermediate agent step, never test whether a cheaper replacement preserves downstream task success, and often rely on online LLM judges at evaluation time. We introduce TwinRouterBench, a step-level routing benchmark with two tracks. The static track provides 970 router-visible prefixes from 520 instances across SWE-bench, BFCL, mtRAG, QMSum, and PinchBench, each paired with an execution-verified target tier estimated under a released downgrade-and-cascade protocol; scoring is deterministic arithmetic over tier labels, trajectory membership, and token costs, with no online evaluator-side LLM judge. The dynamic track supplies a harness that runs routers on the full 500-case SWE-bench Verified suite; in this paper we report a 100-case held-out evaluation disjoint from the static SWE supervision split. At each LLM call the router selects a concrete model from a locked pool, and success is measured by official task resolution and realized API spend. The two tracks support fast offline iteration followed by end-to-end validation under live agent execution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/CommonstackAI/TwinRouterBench.
Pei Yang, Wanyi Chen, Tongyun Yang +14
May 14, 2026cs.LG

Latency-Quality Routing for Functionally Equivalent Tools in LLM Agents

Tool-augmented LLM agents increasingly access the same tool type through multiple functionally equivalent providers, such as web-search APIs, retrievers, or LLM backends exposed behind a shared interface. This creates a provider-routing problem under runtime load: the router must choose among providers that differ in latency, reliability, and answer quality, often without gold labels at deployment time. We introduce LQM-ContextRoute, a contextual bandit router for same-function tool providers. Its key design is latency-quality matching: instead of letting low latency offset poor answers in an additive reward, the router ranks providers by expected answer quality per service cycle. It combines this capacity-aware score with query-specific quality estimation and LLM-as-judge feedback, allowing it to adapt online to both load changes and provider-quality differences. On the main web-search load benchmark, LQM-ContextRoute improves F1 by +2.18 pp over SW-UCB while staying on the latency-quality frontier. In a high-heterogeneity StrategyQA setting, LQM-ContextRoute avoids additive-reward collapse and improves accuracy by up to +18 pp over SW-UCB; on heterogeneous retriever pools, it improves NDCG by +2.91--+3.22 pp over SW-UCB. These results show that same-function tool routing benefits from treating latency as service capacity, especially when runtime pressure and provider-quality heterogeneity coexist.
Kexin Chu, Dawei Xiang, Wei Zhang
May 13, 2026cs.LG

U-HNO: A U-shaped Hybrid Neural Operator with Sparse-Point Adaptive Routing for Non-stationary PDE Dynamics

Solutions to many partial differential equations (PDEs) display coexisting smooth global transport and localized sharp features within a single trajectory: shock fronts, thin interfaces, and concentrated high-frequency content sit on top of slowly varying backgrounds. This poses a challenge for neural operators: Fourier-based architectures mix nonlocal interactions efficiently but tend to under-resolve localized non-smooth features, whereas spatially local architectures recover fine detail at the cost of long-range propagation and rollout stability. Existing hybrid operators paper over this tension with a fixed, spatially uniform fusion that forces the same trade-off everywhere. We propose U-HNO, a U-shaped hybrid neural operator whose central design is Sparse-Point Adaptive Routing (SPAR): at every spatial location, a per-pixel hard mask selects whether the global Fourier branch or the local multi-scale Gaussian branch should dominate, and the sparsity ratio is a function of the local contrast of the routing signal, so smooth and shock-aligned regions receive different mixtures of global and local computation. SPAR is embedded in a hierarchical encoder-bottleneck-decoder backbone with skip connections so that the dual branches and the gate operate at every resolution. Training combines pointwise supervision with a finite-difference H^1 gradient term and a band-wise spectral consistency regularizer. Across benchmarks spanning 1D Burgers, Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, KdV, 2D advection, Allen-Cahn, Navier-Stokes, Darcy flow, and 3D transonic compressible Navier-Stokes from PDEBench, U-HNO achieves state-of-the-art rollout accuracy on the majority of tasks in both relative L^2 and H^1 metrics, with the largest gains on problems dominated by sharp localized features. Ablations show that removing any single component substantially degrades rollout error.
Yingzhe Ma, Xiao Yang, Yuxin Xie +2
May 13, 2026cs.NI

NeuroRisk: Physics-Informed Neural Optimization for Risk-Aware Traffic Engineering

In production Wide-Area Networks (WANs), correlated failures dominate availability losses, forcing operators to reserve large safety margins that leave substantial capacity underutilized. Achieving high utilization under strict availability targets therefore requires risk-aware Traffic Engineering (TE) over dozens to hundreds of probabilistic failure scenarios-yet solving this problem at operational timescales remains elusive. We demonstrate that existing risk-aware formulations can be unified under an embedded Sort-and-Select structure, exposing a fundamental trade-off between expressiveness and tractability: classical optimizers either restrict scenario selection for efficiency or incur prohibitive decomposition costs. While deep learning appears promising, prior Deep TE methods mainly target maximum link utilization and rely on scaling-based feasibility, which fundamentally breaks under explicit capacity constraints and scenario-dependent risk. We present NeuroRisk, a physics-informed deep unrolled optimizer that exploits the structure of Sort-and-Select. NeuroRisk enforces feasibility via gated edge-local reservations and represents scenario sets through permutation-invariant, gradient-aligned cues. Evaluations on production-style WANs show that NeuroRisk achieves small optimality gaps relative to the solver with orders of magnitude speedup (102105×)(10^2- 10^5 \times) on risk objectives, while outperforming neural baselines on nominal throughput.
Yingming Mao, Ximeng Liu, Jingyi Cheng +8
May 12, 2026cs.LG

The Routing and Filtering Structure of Attention

The attention interaction matrix QKQK^{\top} contains two entangled computations: a skew-symmetric component that redistributes information between positions (routing) and a symmetric component that scales mutual relevance (filtering). We decompose 1776 heads across five pretrained transformers and find routing operating at low rank, well below the routing capacity allocated by the weight kernel. We introduce SS-DD attention as a diagnostic parameterization that disentangles routing from filtering by construction with guaranteed stability (Re(λ)0\mathrm{Re}(λ) \le 0) and trains stably without layer normalization. When disentangled and unnormalized, routing self-organizes into a spectral cascade, effective rank 22 at the first layer, expanding with depth across six scales from 7M to 355M parameters. The cascade predicts where attention can be simplified: linearizing the first seven layers of 125M SS-DD attention costs <5%{<}5\% perplexity, whereas standard attention collapses under the same intervention. The linearizable region widens with depth. Replacing the first four layers with ELU+1 linear attention reaches within 1.4%1.4\% of baseline at full head dimension. Cascade-allocated architectures trade attention parameters for perplexity (47%65%47\%-65\% fewer attention parameters at +3.9%+3.9\% to +8.4%+8.4\% PPL). The routing-filtering decomposition makes the spectral budget legible; the cascade makes it actionable.
Shafayeth Jamil, Rehan Kapadia
May 12, 2026cs.IT

CR^2: Cost-Aware Risk-Controlled Routing for Wireless Device-Edge LLM Inference

As large language models (LLMs) move from centralized clouds to mobile edge environments, efficient serving must balance latency, energy consumption, and accuracy under constrained device-edge resources. Query-level routing between lightweight on-device models and stronger edge models provides a flexible mechanism to navigate this trade-off. However, existing routers are designed for centralized cloud settings and optimize token-level costs, failing to capture the dynamic latency and energy overheads in wireless edge deployments. In this paper, we formulate mobile edge LLM routing as a deployment-constrained, cost-aware decision problem, and propose CR^2, a two-stage device-edge routing framework. CR^2 decouples a lightweight on-device margin gate from an edge-side utility selector for deferred queries. The margin gate operates on frozen query embeddings and a user-specified cost weight to predict whether local execution is utility-optimal relative to the best edge alternative under the target operating point. We further introduce a conformal risk control (CRC) calibration procedure that maps each operating point to an acceptance threshold, enabling explicit control of the marginal false-acceptance risk under the full-information utility reference. Experiments on the routing task show that CR^2 closely matches a full-information reference router using only device-side signals before deferral. Compared with strong query-level baselines, CR^2 consistently improves the deployable accuracy-cost Pareto frontier and reduces normalized deployment cost by up to 16.9% at matched accuracy.
Nan Xue, Shengkang Chen, Zhiyong Chen +4
May 12, 2026cs.AI

GAR: Carbon-Aware Routing for LLM Inference via Constrained Optimization

The growing deployment of large language models (LLMs) makes per-request routing essential for balancing response quality and computational cost across heterogeneous model pools. Current routing methods rarely consider sustainable energy use and CO2 emissions as optimization objectives, despite grid carbon intensity varying by time and region, and models differing significantly in energy consumption. To address this gap, we introduce Green-Aware Routing (GAR), a constrained multi-objective optimization framework that minimizes per-request CO2 emissions subject to explicit accuracy floors and p95-latency service-level objectives (SLOs). GAR employs adaptive constraint optimization through per-dataset floor tuning and incorporates lightweight estimators for correctness, tail latency, and carbon emissions, enabling real-time routing decisions without additional inference passes. We present GAR-PD, a practical online primal-dual routing algorithm for rolling carbon budgets, alongside heuristic variants that achieve high feasibility coverage while limiting accuracy degradation. Comprehensive experiments across standard NLP benchmarks with heterogeneous LLM pools (7B-70B) demonstrate that GAR achieves substantial carbon reductions while maintaining competitive accuracy and p95 latency guarantees, providing a practical, theoretically grounded approach to sustainable LLM inference.
Disha Sheshanarayana, Rajat Subhra Pal, Manjira Sinha +1