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Auteurs principaux: Ramírez, Guillem, Birch, Alexandra, Titov, Ivan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02134
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author Ramírez, Guillem
Birch, Alexandra
Titov, Ivan
author_facet Ramírez, Guillem
Birch, Alexandra
Titov, Ivan
contents 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 has motivated recent research in the optimisation of LLM calls. Either a cascading strategy is used, where a smaller LLM or both are called sequentially, or a routing strategy is used, where only one model is ever called. Both scenarios are dependent on a decision criterion which is typically implemented by an extra neural model. In this work, we propose a simpler solution; we use only the uncertainty of the generations of the small LLM as the decision criterion. We compare our approach with both cascading and routing strategies using three different pairs of pre-trained small and large LLMs, on nine different tasks and against approaches that require an additional neural model. Our experiments reveal this simple solution optimally balances cost and performance, outperforming existing methods on 25 out of 27 experimental setups.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_02134
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimising Calls to Large Language Models with Uncertainty-Based Two-Tier Selection
Ramírez, Guillem
Birch, Alexandra
Titov, Ivan
Computation and Language
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 has motivated recent research in the optimisation of LLM calls. Either a cascading strategy is used, where a smaller LLM or both are called sequentially, or a routing strategy is used, where only one model is ever called. Both scenarios are dependent on a decision criterion which is typically implemented by an extra neural model. In this work, we propose a simpler solution; we use only the uncertainty of the generations of the small LLM as the decision criterion. We compare our approach with both cascading and routing strategies using three different pairs of pre-trained small and large LLMs, on nine different tasks and against approaches that require an additional neural model. Our experiments reveal this simple solution optimally balances cost and performance, outperforming existing methods on 25 out of 27 experimental setups.
title Optimising Calls to Large Language Models with Uncertainty-Based Two-Tier Selection
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02134