LLM Routing
LLM: Large Language Model
Momentum
30 papers in the last four weeks, up 88% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.
Latest papers 224
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise settings, yet individual models remain bounded by model-specific capability limitations. These heterogeneous boundaries pose a deployment challenge, but also create an opportunity: strategically coordinating multiple LLMs may unlock collective intelligence exceeding any single model. Existing approaches fix how models are combined in advance, overlooking the dynamic, state-dependent role of complementarity in complex problem solving. Drawing on the wisdom-of-crowds paradigm, we reconceptualize collective LLM intelligence as relay-style complementarity: a sequential process in which each successor model is selected to address the specific bottleneck identified in its predecessor's output. To operationalize this, we propose WILC (Wisdom Integration of LLM Crowds), a framework grounded in two design principles. First, iterative reflection-and-refinement establishes a state-preserving workflow through which models diagnose and refine prior outputs. Second, complementarity-driven model selection governs transitions via a dual-gate mechanism: prospective complementarity fit (PCF) identifies the worker most suited to the current bottleneck, while posterior complementarity gain (PCG) evaluates whether the selected transition improves the evolving solution. Experiments across four diverse benchmarks show that WILC outperforms existing approaches, including single-model self-refinement, ensemble methods, and query-routing methods. Under standardized pricing assumptions, WILC matches the average benchmark performance of GPT-5.2 at roughly 7 times lower estimated per-query cost, while facilitating data sovereignty through self-hosted deployment. This study extends wisdom-of-crowds theory from static aggregation to sequential AI complementarity and provides transferable design principles for multi-AI coordination.
FedWeave: Rethinking the Unit of Specialization in Heterogeneous Federated MoE-LoRA
Federated PEFT enables LLMs to collaboratively adapt to decentralized private data without sharing raw examples. However, task heterogeneity across clients can cause cross-task interference and gradient conflicts during aggregation. Federated MoE-LoRA addresses this challenge through specialized LoRA experts and conditional routing. Yet existing methods typically specialize at client granularity, implicitly assuming task-coherent clients. Our core insight is that experts need purity, namely pattern-coherent updates that preserve specialization, whereas routers need contrast, namely mixed-task observations that support expert comparison. We propose FedWeave, a framework that adopts asymmetric aggregation, separating expert aggregation from router optimization to meet these two requirements. FedWeave uses unsupervised prototype discovery to form local buckets and align them across clients, enabling prototype-level expert aggregation while retaining mixed-task client trajectories for router training. At inference, FedWeave performs sparse inference with one active expert while preserving nearly all soft-routing performance. Our theoretical analysis explains why asymmetric aggregation is advantageous: it controls expert convergence in stationarity through off-pattern contamination, identifies the consensus error induced by fragmented router trajectories, and bounds sparse-inference risk. On a heterogeneous multi-task benchmark with mainstream LLM backbones, FedWeave consistently outperforms strong baselines, while ablations verify the effectiveness of our design.
Divergence Decoding: Training-Free Capability Fusion
While large language models excel in reasoning, these generalists often lack knowledge for specialized scientific domains. Conversely, domain models~(specialists), while knowledgeable, suffer from specialization side-effects including diminished logic and reduced robustness.To address this dilemma, we introduce Divergence Decoding, a training-free framework for capability fusion. It reconstructs the "draft-and-verify" skeleton of speculative decoding into an adaptive routing mechanism. The core is using Jensen-Shannon divergence to monitor the distributional disagreement between the two models at each token. When the specialist exhibits significant divergence, our method identifies it as a potential reasoning risk and instantaneously routes control to the generalist. This allows the dynamic injection of general reasoning while preserving domain expertise, achieving inference-time policy composition of the generalist and the specialist.We evaluate Divergence Decoding across diverse model families (Qwen and Llama series) on challenging scientific benchmarks (GPQA, ChemBench, and ChemCoTBench). Experimental results demonstrate that Divergence Decoding outperforms both the domain-specialized and general-purpose models, effectively surpassing the performance of most single-model baseline. This suggests that Divergence Decoding provides a general, training-free paradigm for fusing diverse LLM capabilities through adaptive inference-time collaboration.
How Often Should a Recommender Call an LLM? Value-Weighted Routing, Monitoring, and Seasonal Robustness
Routing decisions between a cheap heuristic and an expensive large language model (LLM) are typically framed as a difficulty problem: send the hard cases to the expensive path. We argue this framing is incomplete because difficulty and business value are distinct axes - a difficult cheap item and a difficult costly item do not have the same cost of error. We present Value Router, a fully synthetic simulation of a retail merchandising pipeline that routes items using only estimated difficulty and estimated value, never ground truth. The study has three stages. First, a value-weighted threshold router is compared with a difficulty-only and a random baseline on a synthetic catalog with an inverse correlation between category volume and value. Value-weighting matches the difficulty-only baseline's recall of true high-value items (60%) while achieving substantially higher precision (98.3% vs. 94.3%). Second, a decision logger and monitor expose a failure mode hidden by aggregate metrics showing that the aggregate result is driven almost entirely by between-category differences rather than per-item discrimination. Third, a simulated Black Friday demand surge (2.5 volume with a shift toward higher-value categories) compares a static router, a seasonally tuned router, and two slow-path budget policies. All results are from a controlled synthetic simulation with experimenter-defined ground truth and illustrate design principles for cost-aware routing systems rather than validated real-world claims.
WISERouter: LLM Routing with Workload Budget Constraint
Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across multiple domains, but using the most capable model for every query is prohibitive at scale. LLM routing exploits diversity in model capability and cost by assigning each query to a suitable model to balance utility and budget. Current methods have two limitations: (i) they either use heuristics that do not always enforce the budget constraint or impose a fixed per-query budget that cannot adapt across the workload and leads to suboptimal performance; (ii) they require supervised learning on a dense dataset with statistics for every query-model pair, which is expensive to collect. To address these challenges, we formulate LLM routing as a constrained contextual multi-armed bandit problem and introduce WISERouter (WR for short), a framework that supports offline learning from historical interactions as well as online learning with exploration. We further prove that WR-Online achieves a sublinear regret bound of over a time horizon . Empirical results on RouterBench and SWE-Bench demonstrate that (i) WR-Offline surpasses existing baselines in performance under a fixed budget and adheres more closely to budget constraints, and (ii) WR-Online achieves comparable performance to the baselines, while using substantially less exploration data.
SMART: LLM-Augmented Hybrid Retrieval for Dynamic Product Ads
Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) require retrieving relevant items from multi-million product catalogs, balancing two competing objectives: retargeting (re-surfacing known interests) and prospecting (discovering new categories). While Large Language Models (LLMs) capture semantic intent better than traditional embedding models, deploying them at scale introduces prohibitive inference costs and lexical mismatch issues. Through controlled experiments on millions of users, we demonstrate a critical retrieval decomposition: rule-generated queries excel at retargeting on a lexical BM25 index, while LLM-generated queries excel at prospecting on a dense ANN index. Building on this, we propose SMART (SeMantic-aware Adaptive ReTrieval). To manage costs, a lightweight quality gate identifies coverage gaps in initial keyword results, adaptively routing only the ~10% of users who benefit from semantic prospecting to the LLM path. Offline evaluation demonstrates that this gated approach captures the bulk of semantic prospecting gains in Relevance Score while maintaining competitive re-targeting performance at a 90% reduction in LLM costs. Finally, in a 2-week online A/B test at Snap, SMART improved the ad conversion rate by +27.6% over a strong embedding-based baseline.
Language-Routed RAG and Direct Option Scoring for Multilingual Financial QA: DS@GT at FinMMEval
We present DS@GT's submission to FinMMEval 2026 Task 1, a multilingual financial exam question answering benchmark spanning English, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, and Hindi. Financial certification exams such as the CFA, EFPA, and CPA demand structured domain reasoning that standard NLP benchmarks do not capture, and this challenge compounds across languages where retrieval and representation infrastructure is underdeveloped. We build a retrieval-augmented pipeline on LangGraph that detects query language and retrieves semantically relevant exemplars from a 30,209-entry multilingual knowledge base using BGE-M3 embeddings and FAISS indexing. The system then scores answers via Retrieval-Augmented Direct Scoring (RADS), reading next-token log-probabilities over candidate option letters rather than generating free-form output. For low-resource languages, we fuse per-language and cross-lingual retrieval indices using weighted Reciprocal Rank Fusion. Model selection is language-routed: Qwen3-14B for Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi; Qwen2.5-14B for English; and Llama-3.1-8B for Greek, a routing derived from empirical ablations that reveal substantial language-asymmetric performance gaps. Notably, chain-of-thought prompting significantly degrades Greek accuracy (90.7% to 20.9%), and enabling Qwen3's default thinking mode collapses Arabic RADS performance to near-chance levels. Our results indicate that effective multilingual financial reasoning requires language-aware retrieval, model routing, and deliberate scoring strategy selection.
TRACE-ROUTER: Task-Consistent and Adaptive Online Routing for Agentic AI
Routing to select large language models (LLMs) with different cost-quality trade-offs has become a fundamental deployment feature of enterprise AI. Existing routers, primarily make independent routing decisions for each LLM call. However, agentic applications execute as long-horizon workflows whose quality is determined only by a delayed, task-level outcome. This mismatch prevents per-call routers from correctly attributing feedback to individual routing decisions. Towards mitigating this, we present TRACE-Router, a task-level routing framework that aligns routing with the unit of supervision. TRACE-Router assigns each task to a model once at admission using a contextual bandit, pins all subsequent LLM calls to the selected backend, and updates its policy using the task's terminal reward, jointly accounting for accuracy and latency. By leveraging delayed task feedback, TRACE-Router learns routing policies that adapt to the workload while avoiding explicit task-complexity estimation. Across three agentic benchmarks, TRACE-Router consistently improves the accuracy-latency trade-off, achieving non-dominated Pareto frontier points. On tau2-Bench, it outperforms latency-matched interpolation between individual models by 7-8 accuracy points, while on Terminal-Bench it achieves 7.1 higher accuracy points than the strongest single model baseline with 36% lower latency.
PyroDash: Cost-Efficient Token-Level Small-Large Language Model Collaborative Inference
Large language models (LLMs) provide strong reasoning capabilities but are expensive to serve at scale, whereas small language models (SLMs) are cheaper but less reliable on difficult problems. We introduce PyroDash, a cost-aware framework for token-level SLM-LLM collaborative inference. During generation, the SLM decides whether to request assistance by emitting a control token. A Collaborate Engine then sends the query and partial reasoning trace to a frozen LLM for completion through a single handoff. The policy is internalized in the SLM, requiring neither a separate router, LLM retraining, nor access to LLM logits. PyroDash trains the SLM in three stages: control-token embedding learning, offloading-oriented supervised fine-tuning, and cost-aware alignment with Group Relative Policy Optimization. Its reward balances answer accuracy against inference cost normalized by LLM-only inference. Across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, PyroDash supports different accuracy-cost operating points. With , it achieves 64.04 percent average accuracy, 6.36 percentage points above the LLM-only baseline, while reducing cost by 20.4 percent. With , it achieves 54.55 percent accuracy with a 1.90 percent LLM token ratio and 0.012 LLM calls per example, reducing total cost from USD 49.36 to USD 1.78. These results show that learned token-level handoffs can reduce LLM use while preserving strong reasoning performance.
TriAgent: Divergence-Aware Multi-Agent Committees for Cost-Efficient Financial Sentiment Analysis
Production LLM-based financial sentiment analysis faces a structural cost trap: most queries are trivially classifiable, yet expensive cloud reasoners process them all, and the bill scales linearly with user count. We present TriAgent, a multi-agent committee stratified by contextual granularity -- a word-level lexicon (VADER), a sentence-level domain transformer (FinBERT), and a cross-sentence reasoner (Qwen2.5, 0.5B-14B-4bit, with Mistral-7B and Phi-3.5-mini cross-family checks). A three-way Semantic Divergence Index (SDI) measures pairwise disagreement across granularities and routes each query accordingly. Our central finding is the critic plateau: when the LLM is re-tasked as a critic over the smaller agents' outputs, F1 plateaus at ~0.87 across 1.5B-7B Qwen (bootstrap 95% CIs overlap), while a same-size 3-persona vote drops to F1=0.66, which is driven by granularity-stratified diversity. Three corollaries follow from the same SDI signal: (i) a Shared Consensus Dictionary on multilingual sentence-BERT answers 95% of Chinese queries from an English cache at F1=0.99 -- cross-border canonicalization at zero marginal cost; (ii) SDI doubles as a post-hoc LLM-hallucination detector at AUC=0.90; (iii) the SDI single-stage strategy attains the best risk-adjusted return (Sharpe=3.50) on a 20-ticker back-test, dominating both always-FinBERT (1.36) and always-LLM (0.11). At 10M-user scale, TriAgent saves $9.3M/year vs. a GPT-4o-mini baseline. Code, lexicons, and the SCD are released.
VDAR-Router: Adaptive LLMs Routing via Verbalized Query Difficulty Analysis Retrieval
Large language models are increasingly used in practical systems, making efficient model selection important for reducing deployment cost. LLM routing has emerged as a practical solution for allocating each input query to an appropriate model under a desired cost-performance trade-off. Existing routing methods often estimate model suitability from the surface semantics or embedding similarity of the input query. However, such methods may ignore the underlying difficulty of a query, leading to suboptimal routing decisions. To address the challenge, we propose VDAR-Router, a difficulty-aware retrieval-based routing framework. For each input query, VDAR-Router first generates an explicit difficulty analysis. It then retrieves historical examples with similar difficulty profiles. Based on the retrieved records, it estimates candidate model suitability and selects the model using a reward function that considers both performance and cost. Experiments on three datasets show that VDAR-Router consistently achieves better cost-performance trade-offs than existing baselines. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of difficulty-aware retrieval for training-free LLM routing. Case studies further show that explicit query analysis helps retrieve more relevant examples and supports more reliable routing decisions.
AdaHome: An Adaptive Smart Home Assistant using Local Small Language Models
Smart home assistants interpret a wide range of user commands, from explicit device control to underspecified and preference dependent requests. While recent systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) improve this capability, they often rely on heavyweight reasoning pipelines and cloud-based deployment, limiting their efficiency and suitability for resource-constrained environments, and raising privacy concerns. In addition, existing approaches provide limited support for stable long-term personalization. To address these issues, we present AdaHome, an adaptive smart home assistant designed for locally deployed small language models in smart home environments. Rather than applying complex reasoning uniformly, AdaHome introduces an intent-aware planning framework that dynamically routes commands either to straightforward prompt-based or lightweight reasoning-based components. For commands requiring interpretation, we adopt a Chain-of-Draft strategy to enable efficient and stable decision-making. To support personalization, we further propose a preference adaptation mechanism that learns from user feedback over time without requiring prompt augmentation or model retraining. We evaluate AdaHome against representative LLM-based baselines under a unified small model setting. AdaHome achieves substantially higher accuracy on direct commands (86.7%) while reducing latency by up to 3. Furthermore, it maintains competitive performance on ambiguous inputs with lower computational cost. In multi-turn scenarios, AdaHome achieves 88% preference consistency, compared to 52.5% for a prompt augmentation baseline.
Multi-level context Modeling for consistent expert selection in Mixture-of-Experts
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient scaling of Transformer models by routing tokens to a small subset of experts. However, existing routers typically condition expert selection on shallow or isolated token representations, which often produce unstable and semantically inconsistent routing decisions across layers. In this work, we revisit expert selection from a representation perspective and identify context incompleteness as a key bottleneck limiting effective expert specialization. To address this issue, we propose Multi-level Context Fusion MOE (MCF-MOE), a framework that constructs context-aware representations by integrating complementary signals from cross-layer semantic aggregation and local token-level interactions, enabling more informative and consistent expert selection. Experiments on language modeling and understanding benchmarks demonstrate that MCF-MOE consistently improves routing consistency and downstream performance over strong MoE baselines, highlighting the importance of contextual completeness in expert routing. The code is available at https://github.com/shuhanhuang/MCF-MOE.
ContinuityBench: A Benchmark and Systems Study of Stateful Failover in Multi-Provider LLM Routing
In production large language model (LLM) deployments, high API availability guarantees do not equate to conversational continuity. When a primary provider experiences an outage or strict rate-limiting, naive stateless failover mechanisms successfully maintain uptime but silently discard conversation history, severely disrupting the user experience. To rigorously quantify and resolve this failure mode, we introduce two novel metrics: Continuity Preservation Rate (CPR) and Continuity Latency Overhead (CLO). We propose a stateful, multi-provider proxy architecture utilizing a History-Forwarding strategy to seamlessly reconstruct conversational state across heterogeneous LLM endpoints during failover events. Furthermore, we release continuity-bench, https://github.com/Vishal-sys-code/continuity-bench, an open evaluation harness designed to stress-test context preservation under high-concurrency provider failure conditions. Our empirical evaluation ( failover events) demonstrates that our stateful proxy achieves a 99.20% CPR [95% CI: 98.27%, 99.63%], cleanly transferring deep conversational context to fallback providers, compared to a near-0% preservation rate for standard stateless architectures. Finally, we characterize failover latency distributions, identifying the critical necessity of asynchronous exponential backoff with jitter to prevent cascading retry storms against strict-limit fallback APIs. Our results provide a principled foundation for building robust, state-preserving multi-model inference systems.
Multi-Head Latent Control: A Unified Interface for LLM Agent Decision Making
Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents, but reliable agentic behavior requires more than next-token prediction. At inference time, it is preferred that an agent can decide whether to proceed with its current reasoning, defer to a stronger model, request additional information, invoke external tools, or abstain under the given setup. Existing approaches address these decisions through prompt-level routing, external orchestration, or task-specific fine-tuning, which primarily rely on input-side signals, and are often costly and difficult to maintain as model backbones evolve. We ask whether such control decisions can be inferred directly from a model's latent generation process. We introduce Multi-Head Latent Control, a lightweight layer that reads hidden-state trajectories from a frozen LLM or VLM to produce deployment-time control signals. A Capability Head predicts whether the current model can solve the instance or should defer to a stronger collaborator, while a Resolution Head predicts appropriate resolution decision Clarification, Tool Use, Abstention, or Direct Answering. Both heads are trained only on latent traces from the same frozen LLM backbone, enabling post hoc adaptation without modifying the model. Across language and vision-language settings, Multi-Head Latent Control consistently improves the quality-cost tradeoff of multi-model systems, enabling early handoff from partial generations and more accurate intervention decisions. In routed execution (small + large model), it reduces large-model usage by up to 90.7 percent on AndroidWorld and 27-53 percent on average across benchmarks, while retaining most of large-model performance. Additionally, the learned control signals improve tool-use decision quality, yielding up to +158 percent relative score gain and 65.5 percent fewer missed-required tool calls.
When is Routing Meaningful? Diversity and Robustness in Language Model Societies
Routing policies for multi-model systems are evaluated almost exclusively on task accuracy and inference cost. We argue that two properties, orthogonal to performance, determine whether routing is meaningful. First, the society of actors must be behaviourally differentiated: if all actors respond identically, routing is vacuous. Second, the routing policy must be stable: surface-form variants of a query should be assigned to the same actor. High task accuracy is compatible with violating both properties, since a router can operate over a redundant society or assign queries inconsistently, preventing specialisation regardless of performance. We adapt Hierarchic Social Entropy (HSE) to language-model societies and introduce a perturbation-based robustness metric to diagnose these failure modes. Applied to EmbedLLM and RouterBench, we find that HSE exhibits strong diminishing returns, suggesting that a curated subset of fewer than ten agents recovers most available diversity in a large pool -- a practical coreset heuristic for society design. We further find that KNN routers gain accuracy from specialist societies but collapse in robustness under perturbation, while prompted routing remains stable across all perturbation types -- illustrating that accuracy and meaningfulness can sharply diverge.
Correlation-Aware Contextual Bandits with Surrogate Rewards for LLM Routing
We study contextual bandit problems with correlated arms and access to surrogate reward signals produced by a machine learning model, motivated by applications such as large language model (LLM) routing. Unlike classical contextual bandits that rely solely on bandit feedback and assume conditional independence across arms, our setting allows context-dependent inter-arm correlations and auxiliary reward information that may be noisy or misspecified. We propose algorithms that leverage such surrogate rewards through two complementary designs. A coupled reward-mixing approach pools true and surrogate rewards to accelerate learning when surrogate signals are reliable, while a decoupled prediction-mixing approach maintains separate estimators for bandit feedback and surrogate rewards and adaptively combines their predictions. This decoupling yields robustness to surrogate misspecification, recovering regret guarantees comparable to reward-only bandit methods in the worst case, while achieving improved regret when surrogate predictions are sufficiently informative. We provide theoretical regret analyses for both approaches and evaluate them on LLM routing benchmarks under varying accuracy versus cost trade-offs. The results demonstrate improved sample efficiency and consistently better accuracy-cost trade-offs compared to standard contextual bandit baselines and strong static routing methods.
Sensitivity-Aware Thresholding and Token Routing for Activation Sparsification in Large Language Models
Efficient inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) requires deciding where computation can be reduced while preserving model quality. We study this problem through multilayer perceptron (MLP) activation sparsification and token-level conditional routing. We first propose Sensitivity-Aware Thresholding for Sparsity (SATS), a threshold calibration method to choose layerwise gate thresholds using a local MLP output sensitivity proxy rather than calibrating thresholds directly from activation percentiles. While SATS retains the existing mechanism of sparsifying MLP activations by thresholding gate activations, it replaces percentile-based calibration with a sensitivity-aware selection rule. We then introduce a lightweight token routing framework that dynamically selects between a base path and a modified path on a per-token basis, rather than applying the modified computation uniformly to all tokens. We evaluate both methods on multiple recent open-weight LLMs. Our results show that SATS improves over the threshold-based sparsification baseline at matched actual sparsity and that token routing yields a more favorable quality-throughput trade-off than static activation modification baselines. Overall, our results suggest that improved threshold calibration and token routing can improve the quality-throughput trade-off in LLMs.
TSRouter: Dynamic Modality-Model Selection for Time Series Reasoning
Time series reasoning is essential for real-world problem-solving. While both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can reason about time-series data, their capabilities are complementary: LLMs process time series as text sequences and thus preserve exact numerical understanding, but struggle with global patterns, whereas VLMs efficiently capture these patterns by visualizing time series but may lose fine-grained details. Moreover, models vary significantly in task-specific expertise and inference costs. Dynamically selecting the most suitable modality and model for each query is therefore crucial, yet challenging because it requires modeling the complex interactions among tasks, queries, modalities, and models, which carry rich contextual signals. To this end, we introduce TSRouter, a graph-based dynamic routing framework. TSRouter constructs a heterogeneous graph of task, query, modality, and model nodes to contextualize the interactions among query characteristics, modality attributes, and model capabilities. TSRouter formulates routing as a candidate scoring problem, where each modality-model pair is evaluated based on user-defined performance-cost preferences to select the optimal candidate. Comprehensive evaluations on 4 distinct time series reasoning tasks reveal that TSRouter substantially outperforms diverse baselines with 16% to 46% relative improvements. Furthermore, TSRouter demonstrates robust zero-shot plug-and-play generalization to unseen models and novel tasks and preserves high performance while reducing computational overhead through cost-aware optimization. Our code is available at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/TSRouter.
Resample or Reroute? Recoverable Stopping Debt Without Identified Action Selection
After a weak verifier accepts a large-language-model response, a second call may resample or reroute. Because correctness is hidden, action selection is an identification problem. We order three gates: recoverable stopping debt, two-sided FIT action support, and held-out value from an outcome-blind selector. In a pinned 152-query MBPP+ experiment, a Qwen2.5-14B Base-only false-positive stop leaves +2.592 percentage points of Qwen2.5-7B recovery (query-cluster 95% interval [+1.618, +3.664]). Separately, after 7B Base-test rejection, fixed escalation to 14B exceeds leave-one-out 7B resampling by +2.882 points [+0.931, +5.201]; this is fixed-action ranking, not conditional selection. An all-episode audit produces a +2.697-point realized-maximum gap, but for two actions this statistic equals (1/2)E|Delta| - (1/2)|E Delta| and contains no observable-history term. It lies inside an exact-fold exchangeable reference (mean +3.158; 95% interval [+2.434, +3.947]). The audit unconditionally acts on 1,520 episodes: 1,240 observable stops and 280 verifier rejections; 198 stops are evaluator-only false positives. Neither tested outcome-blind controller improves on fixed rerouting. A separate LiveCodeBench ladder has all-zero FIT action advantages despite exclusive TEST rescues. A preregistered BigCodeBench support gate then finds only 23/19 and 22/19 signed episodes/queries against minima of 25/20, so L1-L4, DEV, and TEST stay unopened. Stopping debt exists, but current evidence does not identify when to resample rather than reroute.
When Should LLMs Search? Counterfactual Supervision for Search Routing
Search-augmented language models can use external evidence to compensate for limitations in parametric knowledge, but search is not uniformly beneficial: models may call search for questions they can already answer, or rely on noisy evidence when correction, clarification, or abstention would be more appropriate. We formulate this as an instance-level search-routing problem: deciding whether search is needed to improve task success relative to a no-search execution. To derive supervision, we compare no-search and forced-search outcomes for the same question and construct an oracle over NO SEARCH, SEARCH, and UNSOLVED based on task-specific success. Using this oracle as both an evaluation criterion and a learning signal, we train search-routing policies with supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization, improving routing macro-F1 on oracle-eligible examples from 0.7082 to 0.8235 for Gemma E2B and from 0.7053 to 0.8365 for Qwen3.5-4B. Further analysis shows that the learned policies reduce model-specific routing failures: Gemma primarily learns no-search restraint, while Qwen further reduces missed search; residual UNSOLVED cases reveal heterogeneous bottlenecks involving model capacity, retrieval budget, evidence use, and policy behavior.
TriRoute: Unified Learned Routing for Joint Adaptive Attention, Experts, and KV-Cache Allocation
Conditional computation can decouple language model quality from per-token inference cost, yet leading techniques act on a single axis in isolation: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) sparsifies the FFN, Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) skips whole transformer blocks, and KV-cache quantization compresses attention memory. We argue these three decisions (attention resolution, expert selection, and cache bit-width) are strongly coupled and should be made jointly: a token rare enough to warrant full attention may also need high-precision caching regardless of which expert processes it. We introduce TriRoute, a single lightweight controller shared across all three axes that, for every token at every layer, emits a coordinated policy: (i) an attention mode (skip/local/full), (ii) a sparse set of FFN experts (with a null expert recovering MoD), and (iii) a KV-cache bit-width. The controller trains end-to-end via a heterogeneous relaxation (Gumbel-Softmax with straight-through estimation for categorical decisions and load-balanced top-k gating for experts) under a Lagrangian budget constraint that turns the average compute and memory cost into a controllable knob. We identify a cross-axis routing-collapse cascade in naive joint training, where collapse on one axis propagates to the others, and address it with per-axis normalization and a coupling-aware balancing loss. On decoder-only models from 160M to 1.3B parameters at compute-optimal token counts, TriRoute Pareto-dominates the best independent MoD+MoE+KV-quantization combination at matched inference FLOPs and memory, while better preserving tail-case robustness on rare entities, code, and arithmetic that pure perplexity optimization erodes. Post-hoc analysis reveals interpretable structure: the controller allocates full attention and high-precision cache to sentence-initial positions, rare subwords, and named entities, while cheaply routing function words.
When Words Predict Workload
Standard distributed \ac{llm} schedulers rely on static token counts or rolling latency averages, making them susceptible to failures on statutorily constrained text. On \ac{epo} claims governed by Article 84 \ac{epc}, linguistic rigidity makes human and machine authorship statistically indistinguishable. Resolving this ambiguity mid-flight forces dynamic multi-model ensemble expansion, triggering unpredictable KV-cache and weight-allocation spikes that saturate consumer-grade edge GPU VRAM and cause severe \ac{oom} crashes. To prevent hardware collapse, we propose a CPU-side Linguistic Resource Forecasting (LRF) gateway. The gateway extracts a 16-dimensional text-structure vector and applies an XGBoost predictor to forecast trap-band membership. The resulting escalation probability () is evaluated against a dynamic, closed-form routing threshold () computed via real-time latency telemetry. Requests are safely routed to either a local Qwen2.5-7B edge worker or a remote contrastive ensemble (Qwen2.5 7B + 32B) on an NVIDIA H100 \emph{before} any edge GPU memory is allocated. In a 6,000-request live trial, the LRF gateway reduced the operational misroute fraction () to --, an order of magnitude below the token-count baseline (). Peak edge VRAM remained safely bounded at (under the ceiling) across a variation in \ac{wan} delay. The predictor achieved a live-trial AUROC of , and the dynamic controller yielded an relative reduction in misroutes compared to an equivalent static threshold.
Mechanism-level routing failure in LLMs over Lean-verified algebraic structures
We present an empirical study of structural routing failure in large language models (LLMs) over a formally verified algebraic corpus. The task requires selecting the correct proof-mechanism label from a fixed closed template set for compact mathematical objects drawn from the FiberRing formalization in Lean 4, where each item is anchored to a Lean-verified artifact and assigned a label from the corresponding certificate family. Our central finding is a mechanism-level routing ceiling: under blind conditions, gpt-oss-120b achieves 80.3% template accuracy on 22 FiberRing items (n=66; temperature=0, seed=0), while Llama 3.3 70B reaches 68.2%. Exposing a mechanism-bearing Lean verdict/witness cue (Condition A2) raises accuracy to 90.9% and 81.8% -- gaps of +10.6 and +13.6 pp termed cue-induced routing uplift. The dominant failure is a CRT-to-ring-equivalence misroute: gpt-oss-120b misroutes 7 of 12 CRT items (58.3%) blind, zero under A2. A cross-model dissociation in Llama is notable: verdict accuracy is identical in both conditions (95.5%), while template accuracy improves 13.6 pp -- confirming that truth inference and proof-mechanism classification are separable capacities. A cross-corpus extension (Set B; 6 POM/CollisionKernel items, 72 evaluations) provides a small cross-module check: CRT-granularity compression reappears with different labels, and an inverse cross-model dissociation emerges. These findings extend the router hypothesis (Cazares 2026) to formal algebraic structures. The full pipeline, manifest, and results are at https://github.com/bytepro-ai/fiber-routing-eval.
Parametric Memory Decoding for Zero-Shot Routing in LoRA-Based External Parametric Memory
With the rise of parametric memory, LoRA-based External Parametric Memory (EPM) has emerged as a modular solution, but existing routing methods often introduce additional training, deployment, and maintenance overhead. This raises a natural question: can a LoRA-based EPM bank be routed without maintaining an additional routing component? However, existing zero-shot LoRA routing methods still face two problems under the EPM setting: (1) their evaluations are scattered across different task settings rather than organized around EPM access, and (2) their routing signals lack a unified perspective to guide systematic improvement. To address these problems, we organize PMD-Bench, covering document-level, domain-level knowledge, and task-skill, and propose Parametric Memory Decoding (PMD), the first framework designed to systematically improve zero-shot LoRA routing by reframing it as decoding activations over external parametric memory. Based on PMD, we further instantiate PMDRouter, which scores each LoRA by its response magnitude from a single base-model prefill. Experiments on PMD-Bench show that PMDRouter achieves the strongest internal-signal performance across multiple zero-shot routing settings. These results demonstrate the feasibility of zero-shot LoRA routing and suggest that PMD can serve as a general framework for improving zero-shot routing methods. Sources: Github (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Parametric-Memory-Decoding-872A/)
Online Linear Programming for Multi-Objective Routing in LLM Serving
We study the online routing problem in large language model serving, where requests arrive sequentially and must be dispatched to parallel decode workers under tight batch-size and KV-cache constraints. Unlike widely used routing heuristics that are not tied to explicit service-level objectives (SLOs) and offer limited control over latency-throughput trade-offs, we introduce a multi-objective optimization framework that formulates routing as an online linear programming with interpretable decision rewards. We apply an efficient bid-price control policy based on the online linear programming that admits requests when their SLO-weighted benefit exceeds their shadow prices. To meet millisecond decision requirements, we develop a warm-started, projected first-order updates that track the evolving dual shadow prices online with predictable runtime. We integrate our router into the Vidur simulator and demonstrate substantial improvements over standard baselines across multiple SLO regimes, including end-to-end latency, time-to-first-token, throughput, and tail performance. A big picture from our result: a science-based approach outperforms others based on heuristics.
What Does a Routing Oracle Measure Under Stochastic Decoding? Coupling, Scorer Choice, and Single-Commit Ceilings
Routing benchmarks often compare a policy that commits to one model before seeing its response with a hindsight oracle that credits any correct recorded output. Under stochastic decoding these are different decision classes. For success marginals under a frozen query--model--decoder--scorer protocol, we distinguish the clairvoyant single-commit ceiling , product-coupling union , and premium . The marginals alone identify exactly the union interval : zero premium is attainable over compatible couplings, not established for an actual deployment. If generation is independent across models, product is the specified protocol's union probability. We audit frozen correctness tensors from 11 open models and 30 archived responses per query--model cell on GSM8K, MATH-500, and GPQA-Diamond. Full-pool display-channel product premiums are 0.371, 3.542, and 5.100 percentage points; the premium intervals from empirical marginals are , , and . Their zero lower endpoints are algebraic. All retained scorers, eight finite-draw paths, and all 2,047 nonempty subpools expose scorer, estimator, and pool sensitivity, not confidence intervals. The GSM8K and GPQA display scorers were developed after limited output inspection. A separate retrospective held-out policy illustration instantiates the policy-specific gap decomposition without establishing new-data generalization. A limited reference-based human check supports scorer agreement only on definite-consensus subsets. Hash-bound evidence supports number checks, not end-to-end reproduction. The contribution is a measurement contract for interpreting oracle gaps conditional on coupling, decision class, scorer, pool, and finite draws, not a population effect or an equal-cost routing gain.
A Workflow-Aware Serving Layer for Agentic Applications
Agentic AI applications form an emerging serving workload in which a request creates a workflow: a directed acyclic graph of LLM and tool calls that exposes per-node model choices and optional quality operators such as verifiers. This workload falls between two existing layers. Model-serving engines execute individual calls efficiently but cannot see workflow structure, while agent frameworks fix the workflow but cannot see backend load, so neither jointly chooses each node's model, verifier, and backend under serving-time conditions. We present Dyserve, a workflow-aware serving layer that fills this gap. Dyserve compiles each workflow's per-node model and verifier choices in one integer linear program (ILP) over a heterogeneous backend pool, priced by skill-conditioned offline profiles that transfer across workflows. This couples with hardware entering only through per-model throughput sweeps, and is weighted to concentrate strong models and verification on the nodes whose errors propagate the furthest. Because no single latency-quality preference fits every workload mix, Dyserve pre-solves the program at several pressure levels at admission and shifts a workflow's uncommitted suffix among these strategies under load, keeping the solver off the load-shift path; a failed tool call triggers a one-time residual re-solve that preserves committed work.
Learning to Select, Not Relearn: Hard-Routed Mixtures of Reasoning LoRAs
Composing independently trained LoRA adapters into a single large language model is useful for multi-domain adaptation, especially when the original training data cannot be shared. A common approach is to use MoE-style routing over LoRA experts, but for frozen pretrained adapters, soft weighted combinations can change the unit-scale additive update under which each LoRA module was originally trained. We propose \textbf{Hard-Routed MoR-LoRA}, a two-stage framework for composing frozen reasoning LoRA experts through unit-scale hard selection. First, domain-specific LoRA adapters are trained independently using reinforcement learning from verifiable feedback to obtain reasoning experts. Then, all experts are frozen, reasoning traces are distilled from them, and only a lightweight shared router together with a small attention LoRA is trained for integration. The router selects exactly one expert per token using hard top-1 routing, while a straight-through estimator enables gradient-based training. Experiments across five benchmarks, multiple model scales, and additional model families show that Hard-Routed MoR-LoRA preserves expert behavior while requiring substantially fewer trainable parameters than soft-routing mixture baselines. Our analysis further shows that normalized soft mixtures often concentrate most routing mass on a single expert, suggesting that hard unit-scale routing provides a simple and efficient abstraction for frozen LoRA expert composition.
ComplianceGate: Classifier-Gated Multi-Tier LLM Routing for Inference in Regulated Industries
Large language models deployed in regulated industries operate under two constraints: compliance enforcement and cost efficiency. Personally identifiable information (PII) in user queries can reach model endpoints before the system determines whether that data should leave its jurisdictional boundary. Serving all queries through a single large model consumes full GPU capacity regardless of query complexity while offering no mechanism for geographic routing. Mixture-of-Experts architectures do not address this routing occurs between expert layers within the model after data has already arrived at the endpoint, with all experts loaded in memory regardless of query complexity. We propose a classifier-gated routing architecture that enforces compliance by design. A trained encoder classifier sits before any decoder inference, evaluating each query for complexity and data sensitivity, then routing it to an appropriately sized dense model in the appropriate geographic location. PII-containing queries route to local endpoints before any LLM computation begins, making data residency violations structurally impossible. Simple queries reach small, fast models at a fraction of the cost. Our evaluation on 600 queries demonstrates 39% median latency reduction, 33-52% cost savings depending on query distribution, and generation throughput of 122-200 tokens/second versus 50-64 for the baseline. The encoder classifier achieves 99.2% accuracy with near-perfect PII recall at 7ms inference overhead, establishing pre-inference classification as a practical path to compliance-by-design LLM deployment.