arXiv AI
When LLM Routers Overpay: The Cost of Strong-Model Preference
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arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18
RouteJudge: An Open Platform for Reproducible and Preference-Aware LLM Routing
arXiv:2606. 18774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present RouteJudge, an online pairwise preference evaluation framework for LLM routing systems, with a public platform available at https://routejudge.
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.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1
Dynamic Model Routing and Cascading for Efficient LLM Inference: A Survey
arXiv:2603.04445v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) with diverse capabilities, costs, and domains has created a critical need for intelligent mo...
arXiv AI
Sep 30
You Cannot Pick a Provider From the Price List: Market-Aware Routing for Open-Weight LLM Inference
The paper demonstrates that in open‑weight LLM inference markets, selecting a model is insufficient; clients must also choose a provider, as the same model can differ markedly in quality, latency, availability, and price across providers. The authors propose a market‑aware routing approach, including a measured‑map policy and an online router called FACET, which certifies provider feasibility for each task and safely falls back to a reliable anchor. Experiments show that this strategy yields cost savings while maintaining quality and avoiding degraded endpoints.
arXiv AI
Jul 28
WISERouter: LLM Routing with Workload Budget Constraint
arXiv:2607. 23765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across multiple domains, but using the most capable model for every query is prohibitive at scale.
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.