Related papers: Cost-Saving LLM Cascades with Early Abstention

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to \textit{abstain} when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current…

The correct model response in the face of uncertainty is to abstain from answering a question so as not to mislead the user. In this work, we study the ability of LLMs to abstain from answering context-dependent science questions when…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the rise of reasoning-intensive inference paradigms, where models perform explicit step-by-step reasoning before generating final answers. While such approaches improve…

Recent advances in language models (LMs) have led to significant improvements in quality on complex NLP tasks, but at the expense of increased inference costs. Cascading offers a simple strategy to achieve more favorable cost-quality…

Modern database systems allow users to query or process unstructured text or document columns using LLM-powered functions. Users can express an operation in natural language (e.g., "identify if this review mentions billing issues"), with…

Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce confident but incorrect answers, partly because common binary scoring conventions reward answering over honestly expressing uncertainty. We study whether prompt-only interventions --…

As large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance on complex tasks, they still struggle with longer contextual understanding and high computational costs. To balance efficiency and quality, we introduce LLMSteer, a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across diverse tasks by leveraging pre-trained (i.e., parametric) and external (i.e., contextual) knowledge. While substantial efforts have been made to enhance the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver state-of-the-art performance on complex reasoning tasks, but their inference costs limit deployment at scale. Small Language Models (SLMs) offer dramatic cost savings yet lag substantially in accuracy.…

State-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are powerful problem solvers, but they still occasionally make mistakes. However, adopting AI models in risk-sensitive domains often requires error rates near 0%. To address this gap, we propose collaboration…

In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, early-exit refers to stopping computation at an intermediate layer once the prediction is sufficiently confident, thereby reducing latency and cost. However, recent LLMs adopt improved pretraining…

Building efficient inference framework has gained increasing interests for research community. Early-exit models, a variant of LLMs, improves the inference efficiency of LLMs by skipping rest layers and directly generate output tokens when…

Model cascades, in which a cheap LLM defers to an expensive one on low-confidence queries, are widely used to navigate the cost-quality tradeoff at deployment. Existing approaches largely treat the deferral threshold as an empirical…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance but face critical challenges: hallucinations and high inference costs. Leveraging multiple experts offers a solution: deferring uncertain inputs to more capable experts…

Recent work has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in test-time scaling. By making models think before answering, they are able to achieve much higher accuracy with extra inference computation. However, in…

Automated scoring of student work at scale requires balancing accuracy against cost and latency. In "cascade" systems, small language models (LMs) handle easier scoring tasks while escalating harder ones to larger LMs -- but the challenge…

Multilingual LLMs often have knowledge disparities across languages, with larger gaps in under-resourced languages. Teaching LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps is thus a promising strategy to mitigate hallucinations in…

Researchers and practitioners operating on a limited budget face the cost-performance trade-off dilemma. The challenging decision often centers on whether to use a large LLM with better performance or a smaller one with reduced costs. This…

Large language models often generate confident but incorrect answers rather than abstaining when uncertain. This problem is particularly acute for small language models (SLMs), where computational constraints and autonomous operation…

Cascaded LLM systems coordinate models of varying sizes with human experts to balance accuracy, cost, and abstention under uncertainty. However, single-model tiers at each stage often struggle with ambiguous queries, triggering premature…