arXiv AI

Pricing the Risk of Runtime Compression: Anytime-Valid Admission and a Served-Output Law for Compressed Serving State

arXiv:2608. 15810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Runtime compression of serving state trades quality for capacity with no priced guarantee: systems adapt precision on load signals with no soundness statement, and certified approaches budget request-level risk by a union bound over a pre-declared event count.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

ServeGuard: Verifiable, Bounded-Residual Confinement of Operator-Invisible Channels Without Revealing the Certified Read Factor

ServeGuard is a supply‑chain primitive that allows a publisher to ship a proof‑carrying adapter for an open‑weight language model, proving in zero‑knowledge that the adapter contains no hidden backdoor channel in the monitor’s blind subspace. The proof is inexpensive because it relies on a deterministic function of the public base model, and the served residual is the model’s own public floor. The system lets consumers or regulators verify the absence of this class of hidden channels without revealing the certified read factor or trusting the publisher.

By Dominik Dahlem, Rui Vieira
arXiv AI
Aug 26

The Shadow Price of Intelligence: Quality Degradation in LLM Inference as a Supply Chain Problem

The paper argues that large language model (LLM) providers, constrained by compute, often degrade service during congestion by routing queries to smaller models, cutting reasoning effort, or truncating context. It shows that this practice misrepresents costs because degraded answers can fail, leading to retries that inflate traffic or churn that erodes lifetime value. By modeling inference allocation with newsvendor, retry, and queueing frameworks, the authors derive a ‘shadow price of intelligence’ that quantifies the marginal value of each query, revealing that throttling under congestion acts as a demand lever rather than a cost lever.

By Elioth Sanabria
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

PAGE: Partition-Aware Gated KV-Cache Eviction

PAGE is a partition‑aware gated KV‑cache eviction method that reframes eviction as a per‑input admission decision. It uses a single label‑free scalar— the early‑to‑late drop in pairwise top‑k head agreement—to classify inputs into a capacity‑bound class (where eviction is catastrophic) and a dilution‑prone class (where eviction is safe or beneficial). By thresholding this drop, PAGE applies a base evictor only when necessary, reducing the harm rate in the capacity‑bound regime from 0.75 to 0.026 and achieving a 29× improvement across four models and benchmarks without retraining the evictor.

By Pankaj Kumar, Subhankar Mishra
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Optimal Recovery Meets Bayesian Learning: Where Worst-Case Bounds Pay Off

The paper shows that Worst‑Case Optimal Recovery (OR) and Bayesian learning solve the same Gaussian‑quadratic‑Hilbert problems, linking the radius of information to a nugget‑optimized Gaussian process posterior variance. It evaluates three Bayesian systems, demonstrating that OR can outperform Bayesian methods in certain calibration and reproducibility metrics, yet split‑conformal and other approaches can beat OR in interval scoring, especially under covariate shift. The authors propose matching the guarantee tool to the data regime and auditing that regime first.

By Gordei Verbii
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Pay Only for Disagreement: Certified No-Regression Verdicts for Model Updates with Matching Label-Complexity Bounds

The paper introduces DISCERN, a two-tier protocol for certifying that updates to production models do not increase risk. It first uses unlabeled data to detect benign updates based on disagreement rates, then selectively labels only disagreements through an anytime-valid confidence sequence. The method achieves finite-sample validity with label-complexity bounds of order ρ²/ε², demonstrating significant label savings and strong empirical performance across 14,000+ audit streams.

By Vishnu Bindu Balachandran