Atropos: Improving Cost-Benefit Trade-Off of LLM-Based Agents under Self-Consistency with Early Termination and Model Hotswap

Abstract

Open-weight Small Language Models(SLMs) can provide faster local inference at lower financial cost, but may not achieve the same performance level as commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) that are orders of magnitudes larger. Consequently, many of the latest applications of LLMs, such as software engineering agents, tend to be evaluated on larger models only, leaving the issue of improving the cost-benefit trade-off of such applications neglected. This paper proposes Atropos, a predictive early-termination analysis and hotswap technique that aims to improve the cost-benefit trade-off for LLM-based agents that use self-consistency. The core component of Atropos is a predictive model based on structural properties of LLM inferences: after merging multiple agentic inference paths into a graph representation, Atropos uses Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict whether an ongoing inference will eventually succeed or not. If an agentic task instance running on the source LLM is predicted to fail, Atropos subsequently performs hotswapping, i.e., migrating the on-going inference context onto the more capable target LLM: this is feasible because LLM contexts are stateless. An empirical evaluation of Atropos using three recent LLM-based agents shows that Atropos can predict early termination of eventually failing inferences with the accuracy of 0.85 at the midpoint of the inference. Hotswapping LLMs for such inferences can convert up to 27.57% of them to be successful. Consequently, Atropos achieves 74.35% of the performance of closed LLMs with as low as only 23.9% of the cost.