arXiv AI
Oct 5

What Does a Token Cost? A Mixture-of-Agents Measurement of Sufficient Per-Token Compute

The paper introduces a Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) approach to quantify the per-token compute required by large language models. By having a panel of fifteen models of varying sizes attempt to reproduce each token, the authors define the smallest successful agent’s inference cost as the token’s sufficient compute, providing an upper bound on necessary computation. Experiments on benchmarks show that a 0.5B model can reproduce most tokens, and that the MoA-derived compute map can reduce latency in model routing and drafting tasks while improving or maintaining accuracy.

By Zhixu Du, Weijia Han, Hai Helen Li, Yiran Chen