arXiv AI

Rethinking Quality in Large Language Model Routing: Security-Conditioned Model-and-Budget Selection

arXiv AI
Sep 30

Routing Should Pay for Itself: Sparse Supervision for Economical LLM Routing

The paper introduces SaveRouter, a sparse‑supervision framework for large language model routing that selectively gathers informative model feedback and shares capability information across related queries. By using only about 33–41% of available training feedback, SaveRouter achieves competitive or superior routing quality while reducing the break‑even deployment volume by 1.9–9.5× compared to conventional routers. The study also shows that the supervision level that minimizes serving cost may differ from the one that yields the earliest payback.

By Guannan Lai, Gelin Bian, Hao-Xuan Ma, Jun-Peng Jiang, Long Chen, Jian-Dong Liu, Zhi-Hao Tan, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

CopRoute: Dependence-Aware Conformal Routing for Language Models

CopRoute introduces a dependence-aware conformal routing method for language models that orders models by the number of new queries each correctly answers beyond those already covered, selecting the minimal cutoff that satisfies a target all‑miss risk. This approach accounts for model failure dependencies—such as shared training data or architecture—that traditional risk‑controlled policies ignore. Experiments on RouterBench and RouterEval show CopRoute achieves fewer certified inference calls than state‑of‑the‑art methods, reducing calls by up to 79 % in some cases while maintaining the same risk level.

By Siva Rajesh Kasa, Santhosh Kumar Kasa, Karan Gupta
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Effective and Efficient Threat Hunting with Small Language Models

The paper presents a framework for translating natural‑language queries into Kusto Query Language (KQL) using small language models (SLMs). It introduces lightweight retrieval, error‑aware prompting, LoRA fine‑tuning with rationale distillation, and a two‑stage architecture that pairs an SLM drafter with a low‑cost LLM judge. Evaluations on Microsoft’s NL2KQL Defender dataset show the two‑stage approach achieving high syntax and schema‑valid accuracy while dramatically reducing cost compared to larger LLM baselines.

By Saleha Muzammil, Rahul Reddy, Vishal Kamalakrishnan, Hadi Ahmadi, Wajih Ul Hassan
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Learning the Cost of Reliable Inference

arXiv:2609.28322v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarking and routing platforms increasingly act as intermediaries connecting large language model providers with end-users. However, providers on t...

By Dimitrios Rontogiannis, Ander Artola Velasco, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Jailbreaking for the Average Jane: Choosing Optimal Jailbreaks via Bandit Algorithms for Automatically Enhanced Queries

arXiv:2606. 26936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With a profusion of jailbreaks for LLMs now widely known, a growing concern is that non-expert malicious actors ("the average Jane") could elicit actionable responses to malicious requests.

By Prarabdh Shukla, Ritik, Suhas Rao, Arpit Agarwal, Arjun Bhagoji
arXiv AI
Sep 3

SEAL: Reinforcing Global Safety in Mixture-of-Experts through Shared Expert ALignment

The paper introduces SEAL, a training-time, parameter‑efficient defense that attaches a plug‑and‑play adapter to the shared expert component of Mixture‑of‑Experts models, and SEAL++, which adds an orthogonal constraint to preserve existing safety subspaces. By leveraging the always‑activated shared expert, SEAL mitigates the structural vulnerability of sparse routing to adversarial manipulation, reducing attack success rates by up to 60% with minimal impact on model capability. The approach is evaluated across six attack scenarios involving harmful prompting, jailbreaks, malicious fine‑tuning, and neuron pruning.

By Qingyu Meng, Yiwei Zha, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks, Herbert Bos, Min Chen
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Dynamic LLM Routers are Often Misguided

Dynamic LLM routers aim to reduce inference costs by directing each query to the cheapest capable model. In a study of six commercial routers across 14 settings and eight task categories, none surpassed a simple random router that selects between two well-chosen models at the same cost, with some underperforming by over 10 percentage points. The authors identify four common patterns—difficulty blindness, length reversal, semantic matching, and roster suboptimality—that explain this gap and propose a new evaluation method and a simple two-model router that mitigates these patterns, though its advantage over random routing remains modest.

By Sam Wang, Julia White, Sahibzada Allahyar, Dhruv Atreja, Urchade Zaratiana, Kelton Zhang