Do I Need the Cloud? Uncertainty-Aware Step-Level Handoff for Small Language Model Agents

The paper introduces STEPGATE, an uncertainty‑aware handoff framework that evaluates each step of a small language model (SLM) agent and selectively escalates difficult steps to a stronger model. On a 52‑task single‑step benchmark, the Qwen2.5‑1.5B/7B pair achieved 82.7% task success with only 30.8% escalation, outperforming local‑only and random escalation baselines. In multi‑turn tests, STEPGATE reached 69.0% trajectory success and 84.0% action success while using only 30.0% cloud actions, demonstrating that step‑level escalation can close much of the performance gap to a stronger backend with fewer remote tokens.

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• llms
• agents
• safety