Dynamic Model Routing and Cascading for Efficient LLM Inference: A Survey
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2609.23085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems are creating rapidly growing inference energy demands as model sizes grow and reasoning trajector...
arXiv:2511. 09373v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLMs now tackle a wide range of software-related tasks, yet we show that their performance varies markedly both across and within these tasks.
The paper introduces VDAR-Router, a routing framework for large language models that uses verbalized query difficulty analysis to guide model selection. It first generates an explicit difficulty profile for each query, retrieves historical examples with similar profiles, and then estimates model suitability to choose a model based on a reward function balancing performance and cost. Experiments on three datasets show that VDAR-Router consistently outperforms existing baselines in cost‑performance trade‑offs, and case studies confirm that explicit difficulty analysis improves example relevance and routing reliability.
arXiv:2606. 07587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
The paper introduces SCX Router, a lightweight GLiClass-based model selector that assigns suitability scores to inference-time language models without autoregressive generation. It uses a 0.6B-parameter Qwen3 decoder with a shallow bidirectional scorer, preserving a text-only key–value cache across sessions and predicting task attributes such as type, difficulty, and expected output length. The authors build a comprehensive task ontology with 23 families, 115 types, and 1,173 synthetic examples, generating 150,000 verifier-scored tasks to train the router, which outperforms baseline models on LiveBench subsets with a top‑1 score of 0.707 versus 0.696 for the strongest fixed model.
The paper introduces Ban&Pick, a post‑training, plug‑and‑play routing strategy for Sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts large language models. It identifies and reinforces a small group of highly influential experts while dynamically pruning redundant ones, leading to accuracy gains across math, code, and reasoning benchmarks. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen3 show notable performance improvements and a 1.25× inference speedup without retraining or architectural changes.