Evaluating Escalation Signals for LLM Routing: Targets, Controls, and Five Ways to Fool Yourself

arXiv:2610.07354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding when to escalate a query from a small language model to a larger one requires a cheap signal that predicts, before the large model is called, whether escalating would help. Semantic entropy, originally developed to detect hallucinations, is a natural candidate: it measures how much a model's sampled answers disagree in meaning, and high disagreement often signals an unreliable answer. We test it across three benchmarks and two model families. On GSM8K, with a small/large pair about twelve times apart in size, semantic entropy reliably di

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