Robust Online Inference Using Adaptive Model Switching
Published in International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, MCDC Workshop, 2025
Kalpan Mukherjee, Vikramank Singh, Abishek Sankararaman, Murali Narayanaswamy, Tim Kraska
It is well known that Large language models (LLMs) have good zero-shot and few-shot performance which makes them a promising candidate for inference when no or few training samples are available. However, when there is abundant task data, small custom trained models perform as well or are superior in performance to pre-trained LLMs, even after accounting for in-context examples. Further, smaller models are far cheaper and easier to maintain and serve for online traffic. This paper studies algorithms to optimally switch between such models for online inference. In the case when inference traffic is stationary, it makes sense to start with LLMs during the cold-start phase, and then switch over to small custom models once there is sufficient data. However, when distribution shifts are encountered, it is essential to fall back on LLMs while the custom models adapts to the distribution shift. We present an empirical study of such switching behaviors on 3 common real-world tasks like classification, regression, and forecasting across different data modalities like images, text, and time series and show how they can add value from the perspective of both cost and performance.