As teams integrate multiple LLMs - each with different strengths, styles, or cost/latency profiles — routing the right prompt to the right model becomes a critical part of the application design. But it's still an open problem. Most routing systems fall into two camps:
- Embedding-based routers use intent classifiers — label a prompt as “support,” “SQL,” or “math,” then route to a matching model. This works for simple tasks but breaks down in real conversations. Users shift topics mid-conversation, task boundaries blur, and product changes require retraining classifiers.
- Performance-based routers pick models based on benchmarks like MMLU or MT-Bench, or based on latency or cost curves. But benchmarks often miss what matters in production: domain-specific quality or subjective preferences like “Will legal accept this clause?”
Arch-Router takes a different approach: it decouples route selection from model assignment. Developers can write route policies using a domain-action taxonomy (like "engineering" or "image editing" respectively), and the router maps the prompt (and conversation context) to those policies using a lightweight 1.5B autoregressive model. No retraining, no fragile if/else chains. We built this with input from teams at Twilio and Atlassian. Arch-Router handles intent drift, supports multi-turn conversations, and lets you swap in or out models with a one-line change to the routing policy. Full details are in our paper, but here's a snapshot:
Specs:
- 1.5B params — runs on a single GPU (or CPU for testing)
- No retraining needed — point it at any mix of LLMs
- Routing can be cost, latency or quality aware based on your preferences
- Outperforms larger closed models on our conversational routing benchmarks (benchmarks in the paper)
Links:
- ArchGW (open source edge and service proxy for agents ): https://github.com/katanemo/archgw
- Model + code: https://huggingface.co/katanemo/Arch-Router-1.5B
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16655
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