Prattyush Mangal

Prattyush Mangal, Carol Mak, Theo Kanakis et al.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally altered the way we interact with digital systems and have led to the pursuit of LLM powered AI agents to assist in daily workflows. LLMs, whilst powerful and capable of demonstrating some emergent properties, are not logical reasoners and often struggle to perform well at all sub-tasks carried out by an AI agent to plan and execute a workflow. While existing studies tackle this lack of proficiency by generalised pretraining at a huge scale or by specialised fine-tuning for tool use, we assess if a system comprising of a coalition of pretrained LLMs, each exhibiting specialised performance at individual sub-tasks, can match the performance of single model agents. The coalition of models approach showcases its potential for building robustness and reducing the operational costs of these AI agents by leveraging traits exhibited by specific models. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuning can be mitigated by considering a coalition of pretrained models and believe that this approach can be applied to other non-agentic systems which utilise LLMs.

Seamus Somerstep, Felipe Maia Polo, Allysson Flavio Melo de Oliveira et al.

With the rapid growth in the number of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a recent interest in LLM routing, or directing queries to the cheapest LLM that can deliver a suitable response. We conduct a minimax analysis of the routing problem, providing a lower bound and finding that a simple router that predicts both cost and accuracy for each question can be minimax optimal. Inspired by this, we introduce CARROT, a Cost AwaRe Rate Optimal rouTer that selects a model based on estimates of the models' cost and performance. Alongside CARROT, we also introduce the Smart Price-aware ROUTing (SPROUT) dataset to facilitate routing on a wide spectrum of queries with the latest state-of-the-art LLMs. Using SPROUT and prior benchmarks such as Routerbench and open-LLM-leaderboard-v2 we empirically validate CARROT's performance against several alternative routers.