Is Escalation Worth It? A Decision-Theoretic Characterization of LLM Cascades

arXiv:2605.06350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model cascades, in which a cheap LLM defers to an expensive one on low-confidence queries, are widely used to navigate the cost-quality tradeoff at deployment. Existing approaches largely treat the deferral threshold as an empirical hyperparameter,...