pith. sign in

arxiv: 2605.25558 · v1 · pith:S56JHCNMnew · submitted 2026-05-25 · 💻 cs.AI

Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching

Pith reviewed 2026-06-29 21:50 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.AI
keywords LLM routingquery decompositionhistorical matchingout-of-distribution generalizationinference cost optimizationmodel selection
0
0 comments X

The pith

DecoR routes LLMs by decomposing queries into capabilities and matching them against historical logs instead of surface features.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

Current routing methods map queries directly to models using surface-level features, which causes memorization and weak performance on out-of-distribution queries. DecoR recasts routing as a search for similar past queries in logs. It first applies query capability deconstruction to separate linguistic wording from the underlying task requirements. Matching then occurs on those capability dimensions. Tests on the CodaSet benchmark show the method keeps high accuracy while cutting inference costs in both familiar and new query settings.

Core claim

DecoR recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs after query capability deconstruction. The deconstruction decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements and directs matching toward capability dimensions to ground decisions in essential task attributes. On the CodaSet benchmark this yields superior accuracy at substantially lower inference costs for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution queries.

What carries the argument

Query capability deconstruction that separates linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements so that historical matching operates on capability dimensions rather than wording.

If this is right

  • Superior accuracy holds on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution queries.
  • Inference costs drop substantially compared with direct mapping routers.
  • Generalization improves because the memorization trap is avoided.
  • Historical logs become the primary source for routing decisions.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The method may allow smaller log sizes to suffice once decomposition is stable.
  • Similar decomposition-plus-matching could apply to example selection in few-shot prompting.
  • Production systems might replace large model pools with a single router plus growing logs.

Load-bearing premise

Decoupling surface language from task requirements through decomposition will produce matches that generalize reliably to new queries.

What would settle it

A collection of test queries whose task requirements are missed or distorted by the decomposition step, with accuracy then measured against a surface-feature baseline.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.25558 by Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Comparison of routing performance and cost [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p001_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Overview of our DecoR framework. The system deconstructs the input query into a capability profile [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p004_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Performance and normalized cost vs. trade-off [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Trade-off between performance and cost across varying τ values. The figure illustrates the trends for model accuracy (solid blue line) and normalized cost (dashed red line) as τ ranges from 0.1 to 0.9. As τ increases, model performance exhibits an upward trend, accompanied by a corresponding increase in computa￾tional cost. to effectively mitigate the memorization trap. By decoupling task requirements from… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Optimizing the trade-off among predictive performance and computational cost is a central focus in the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current routing methods primarily rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, making them susceptible to the memorization trap and leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this paper, we propose DecoR, a novel routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs, effectively mitigating the memorization trap. To enhance matching accuracy, we introduce a query capability deconstruction method that decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements, directing matching toward capability dimensions to ground decisions in essential task attributes. Furthermore, we develop CodaSet, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing routing generalization, where experimental results demonstrate that DecoR maintains superior accuracy while substantially lowering inference costs across both in-distribution and OOD settings. All the codes and data are available at https://github.com/lvbotenbest/DecoR.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 1 minor

Summary. The manuscript proposes DecoR, an LLM routing framework that recasts routing as historical query matching after decomposing queries into capability dimensions (decoupling surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements). It introduces the CodaSet benchmark and claims that this yields superior accuracy and lower inference costs versus prior methods on both in-distribution and OOD queries while avoiding the memorization trap of surface-level routing.

Significance. If the central empirical claims hold, the work would provide a practical alternative to direct query-to-model mapping that improves generalization and cost-efficiency in LLM serving. The public release of code and data at the cited GitHub repository is a clear strength supporting reproducibility and follow-on work.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: the central claim of maintained superior accuracy on OOD queries while lowering costs is asserted without any quantitative results, baseline comparisons, statistical tests, OOD construction details, or error bars; this prevents verification of the claimed advantage over memorization-based routers.
  2. [Abstract / §3] The query capability deconstruction step (described in the abstract and presumably §3) is load-bearing for the OOD generalization claim, yet the manuscript provides no implementation details (e.g., LLM-based extraction vs. rules), no ablations on its sensitivity to novel capabilities, and no evidence that it avoids per-domain tuning or new failure modes on OOD queries.
minor comments (1)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: 'All the codes and data' should be rephrased to 'The code and data' for standard English usage.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the detailed and constructive review. The comments highlight important areas for clarification and strengthening, particularly around the abstract and the query deconstruction component. We have revised the manuscript accordingly and provide point-by-point responses below.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the central claim of maintained superior accuracy on OOD queries while lowering costs is asserted without any quantitative results, baseline comparisons, statistical tests, OOD construction details, or error bars; this prevents verification of the claimed advantage over memorization-based routers.

    Authors: We agree that the abstract should provide more concrete support for the central claims. In the revised version we have updated the abstract to include specific quantitative results (e.g., accuracy gains and cost reductions relative to the strongest baselines on both in-distribution and OOD splits of CodaSet), a brief description of the OOD construction protocol, and explicit mention of the primary baselines. Detailed tables with error bars, statistical significance tests, and full OOD construction details remain in the experimental section due to length constraints, but the abstract now supplies the key numbers needed for immediate verification. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Abstract / §3] The query capability deconstruction step (described in the abstract and presumably §3) is load-bearing for the OOD generalization claim, yet the manuscript provides no implementation details (e.g., LLM-based extraction vs. rules), no ablations on its sensitivity to novel capabilities, and no evidence that it avoids per-domain tuning or new failure modes on OOD queries.

    Authors: We accept that additional implementation details and supporting experiments are warranted. Section 3 has been expanded with the exact LLM prompt template used for capability extraction, the model employed, and the output schema. We have added a new ablation subsection that (i) compares LLM-based versus rule-based decomposition, (ii) measures sensitivity when novel capability dimensions appear in OOD queries, and (iii) reports performance across the diverse domains in CodaSet without any per-domain fine-tuning or prompt adaptation. Analysis of observed failure modes on OOD queries is also included, showing that the capability-level matching reduces surface-form memorization errors. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity; empirical framework with external evaluation

full rationale

The paper presents DecoR as an empirical routing framework relying on query capability deconstruction and historical matching, evaluated on the introduced CodaSet benchmark. No equations, derivations, or self-citation chains are described that reduce performance claims to fitted parameters or inputs by construction. The central claims rest on experimental results across in-distribution and OOD settings rather than self-referential definitions or renamings.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

No explicit free parameters, axioms, or invented entities are stated in the abstract. The method implicitly relies on the existence of a useful decomposition function and a sufficiently rich historical log, but these are not quantified or postulated as new entities.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5706 in / 1100 out tokens · 32285 ms · 2026-06-29T21:50:48.721563+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

26 extracted references · 20 canonical work pages · 16 internal anchors

  1. [1]

    Jacob Austin, Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Maarten Bosma, Henryk Michalewski, David Dohan, Ellen Jiang, Carrie Cai, Michael Terry, Quoc Le, and Charles Sutton. 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07732 Program synthesis with large language models . Preprint, arXiv:2108.07732

  2. [2]

    Jianlv Chen, Shitao Xiao, Peitian Zhang, Kun Luo, Defu Lian, and Zheng Liu. 2024 a . https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03216 Bge m3-embedding: Multi-lingual, multi-functionality, multi-granularity text embeddings through self-knowledge distillation . Preprint, arXiv:2402.03216

  3. [3]

    Kwok, and Yu Zhang

    Shuhao Chen, Weisen Jiang, Baijiong Lin, James T. Kwok, and Yu Zhang. 2024 b . RouterDC : Query-based router by dual contrastive learning for assembling large language models. In Neural Information Processing Systems

  4. [4]

    Karl Cobbe, Vineet Kosaraju, Mohammad Bavarian, Mark Chen, Heewoo Jun, Lukasz Kaiser, Matthias Plappert, Jerry Tworek, Jacob Hilton, Reiichiro Nakano, Christopher Hesse, and John Schulman. 2021. Training verifiers to solve math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14168

  5. [5]

    DeepSeek-AI. 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437 Deepseek-v3 technical report . Preprint, arXiv:2412.19437

  6. [6]

    DeepSeek-AI, Aixin Liu, Aoxue Mei, Bangcai Lin, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bingzheng Xu, Bochao Wu, Bowei Zhang, Chaofan Lin, Chen Dong, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenhao Xu, Chong Ruan, Damai Dai, Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, and 245 others. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02556 Deepseek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models ....

  7. [7]

    Dujian Ding, Ankur Mallick, Chi Wang, Robert Sim, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Victor Ruhle, Laks VS Lakshmanan, and Ahmed Hassan Awadallah. 2024. Hybrid llm: Cost-efficient and quality-aware query routing. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations

  8. [8]

    Qitian Jason Hu, Jacob Bieker, Xiuyu Li, Nan Jiang, Benjamin Keigwin, Gaurav Ranganath, Kurt Keutzer, and Shriyash Kaustubh Upadhyay. 2024. Routerbench: A benchmark for multi-llm routing system. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2403.12031

  9. [9]

    Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Karl Cobbe. 2023. Let's verify step by step. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.20050

  10. [10]

    Keming Lu, Hongyi Yuan, Runji Lin, Junyang Lin, Zheng Yuan, Chang Zhou, and Jingren Zhou. 2024. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.109 Routing to the expert: Efficient reward-guided ensemble of large language models . In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Langua...

  11. [11]

    RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data

    Isaac Ong, Amjad Almahairi, Vincent Wu, Wei-Lin Chiang, Tianhao Wu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, M Waleed Kadous, and Ion Stoica. 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18665 Routellm: Learning to route llms with preference data . Preprint, arXiv:2406.18665

  12. [12]

    OpenAI. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10925 gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b model card . Preprint, arXiv:2508.10925

  13. [13]

    Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Junxiao Song, Xiao Bi, Haowei Zhang, Mingchuan Zhang, Y. K. Li, Y. Wu, and Daya Guo. 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03300 Deepseekmath: Pushing the limits of mathematical reasoning in open language models . Preprint, arXiv:2402.03300

  14. [14]

    Tal Shnitzer, Anthony Ou, M \' rian Silva, Kate Soule, Yuekai Sun, Justin Solomon, Neil Thompson, and Mikhail Yurochkin. 2023. Large language model routing with benchmark datasets. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.15789

  15. [15]

    Mirac Suzgun, Nathan Scales, Nathanael Sch \"a rli, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yi Tay, Hyung Won Chung, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Quoc V Le, Ed H Chi, Denny Zhou, , and Jason Wei. 2022. Challenging big-bench tasks and whether chain-of-thought can solve them. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.09261

  16. [16]

    Gemma Team, Aishwarya Kamath, Johan Ferret, Shreya Pathak, Nino Vieillard, Ramona Merhej, Sarah Perrin, Tatiana Matejovicova, Alexandre Ramé, Morgane Rivière, Louis Rouillard, Thomas Mesnard, Geoffrey Cideron, Jean bastien Grill, Sabela Ramos, Edouard Yvinec, Michelle Casbon, Etienne Pot, Ivo Penchev, and 197 others. 2025 a . https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19...

  17. [17]

    Kimi Team, Yifan Bai, Yiping Bao, Guanduo Chen, Jiahao Chen, Ningxin Chen, Ruijue Chen, Yanru Chen, Yuankun Chen, Yutian Chen, Zhuofu Chen, Jialei Cui, Hao Ding, Mengnan Dong, Angang Du, Chenzhuang Du, Dikang Du, Yulun Du, Yu Fan, and 150 others. 2025 b . https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20534 Kimi k2: Open agentic intelligence . Preprint, arXiv:2507.20534

  18. [18]

    Chenxu Wang, Hao Li, Yiqun Zhang, Linyao Chen, Jianhao Chen, Ping Jian, Peng Ye, Qiaosheng Zhang, and Shuyue Hu. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09719 Icl-router: In-context learned model representations for llm routing . Preprint, arXiv:2510.09719

  19. [19]

    Yubo Wang, Xueguang Ma, Ge Zhang, Yuansheng Ni, Abhranil Chandra, Shiguang Guo, Weiming Ren, Aaran Arulraj, Xuan He, Ziyan Jiang, and 1 others. 2024. Mmlu-pro: A more robust and challenging multi-task language understanding benchmark. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.01574

  20. [20]

    An Yang, Anfeng Li, Baosong Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bo Zheng, Bowen Yu, Chang Gao, Chengen Huang, Chenxu Lv, Chujie Zheng, Dayiheng Liu, Fan Zhou, Fei Huang, Feng Hu, Hao Ge, Haoran Wei, Huan Lin, Jialong Tang, and 41 others. 2025. Qwen3 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09388

  21. [21]

    Yi-Kai Zhang, De-Chuan Zhan, and Han-Jia Ye. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17282 Capability instruction tuning: A new paradigm for dynamic llm routing . Preprint, arXiv:2502.17282

  22. [22]

    Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zi Lin, Zhuohan Li, Dacheng Li, Eric Xing, Hao Zhang, Joseph E Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica. 2023. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/91f18a1287b398d378ef22505bf41832-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks.pdf Judging llm-as-a-judge with mt-bench and chatbot ...

  23. [23]

    Jeffrey Zhou, Tianjian Lu, Swaroop Mishra, Siddhartha Brahma, Sujoy Basu, Yi Luan, Denny Zhou, and Le Hou. 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07911 Instruction-following evaluation for large language models . Preprint, arXiv:2311.07911

  24. [24]

    Richard Zhuang, Tianhao Wu, Zhaojin Wen, Andrew Li, Jiantao Jiao, and Kannan Ramchandran. 2025. https://openreview.net/forum?id=Fs9EabmQrJ Embed LLM : Learning compact representations of large language models . In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations

  25. [25]

    online" 'onlinestring :=

    ENTRY address archivePrefix author booktitle chapter edition editor eid eprint eprinttype howpublished institution journal key month note number organization pages publisher school series title type volume year doi pubmed url lastchecked label extra.label sort.label short.list INTEGERS output.state before.all mid.sentence after.sentence after.block STRING...

  26. [26]

    write newline

    " write newline "" before.all 'output.state := FUNCTION n.dashify 't := "" t empty not t #1 #1 substring "-" = t #1 #2 substring "--" = not "--" * t #2 global.max substring 't := t #1 #1 substring "-" = "-" * t #2 global.max substring 't := while if t #1 #1 substring * t #2 global.max substring 't := if while FUNCTION word.in bbl.in capitalize " " * FUNCT...