AgentRouter: Heterogeneous Model Routing for Cost-Optimal Multi-Step Agentic Workflows

📅 2026-09-19
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了企业代理系统中模型路由成本高的问题,通过AgentRouter轻量级分类器实现每步任务到不同模型层级的映射,从而降低成本并保持高任务完成质量。
📝 Abstract
Enterprise agentic systems that route every trajectory step to a frontier model waste 60-80% of their inference budget on subtasks that smaller models handle equally well. Existing routing solutions optimize single-turn query assignment but ignore a property unique to agentic workflows: subtask complexity varies widely within a single trajectory. A planning step may require frontier-class reasoning while a subsequent formatting step needs only a 7B model. We formalize step-level model routing as a sequential assignment problem over agent trajectories and propose AgentRouter, a lightweight classifier (12M parameters, <5ms overhead per step on an A100 GPU) that maps each trajectory step to one of four model tiers using five features extractable at routing time. Trained on 50,000 annotated agent trajectory steps spanning planning, coding, research, and data analysis tasks, AgentRouter achieves 72% cost reduction relative to frontier-only baselines, retaining 97.3% of frontier-only quality (less than 3% degradation in end-to-end task completion); per-step routing accuracy reaches 91% on minimal-complexity steps and 85% on efficient-tier steps, with 76-82% on the harder mid-range and frontier tiers. On the same benchmarks, RouteLLM and FrugalGPT (applied per-step) achieve only 31% and 44% cost reduction respectively, because their single-turn training signal misses trajectory-level quality dependencies.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Heterogeneous Model Routing
Cost-Optimal
Agentic Workflows
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Heterogeneous Model Routing
Cost-Optimal
Multi-Step Agentic Workflows
Sequential Assignment Problem
AgentRouter
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