Mirian Del Carmen Hipolito Garcia

Dujian Ding, Ankur Mallick, Shaokun Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools but are often expensive to deploy at scale. LLM query routing mitigates this by dynamically assigning queries to models of varying cost and quality to obtain a desired trade-off. Prior query routing approaches generate only one response from the selected model and a single response from a small (inexpensive) model was often not good enough to beat a response from a large (expensive) model due to which they end up overusing the large model and missing out on potential cost savings. However, it is well known that for small models, generating multiple responses and selecting the best can enhance quality while remaining cheaper than a single large-model response. We leverage this idea to propose BEST-Route, a novel routing framework that chooses a model and the number of responses to sample from it based on query difficulty and the quality thresholds. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method reduces costs by up to 60% with less than 1% performance drop.

Dongge Han, Menglin Xia, Daniel Madrigal Diaz et al.

Small language models (SLMs) offer promising and efficient alternatives to large language models (LLMs). However, SLMs' limited capacity restricts their reasoning capabilities and makes them sensitive to prompt variations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that enhances SLM reasoning capabilities through LLM generated blueprints. The blueprints provide structured, high-level reasoning guides that help SLMs systematically tackle related problems. Furthermore, our framework integrates a prompt template search mechanism to mitigate the SLMs' sensitivity to prompt variations. Our framework demonstrates improved SLM performance across various tasks, including math (GSM8K), coding (MBPP), and logic reasoning (BBH). Our approach improves the reasoning capabilities of SLMs without increasing model size or requiring additional training, offering a lightweight and deployment-friendly solution for on-device or resource-constrained environments.