Evaluating Performance Drift from Model Switching in Multi-Turn LLM Systems
Deployed multi-turn LLM systems routinely switch models mid-interaction due to upgrades, cross-provider routing, and fallbacks. Such handoffs create a context mismatch: the model generating later turns must condition on a dialogue prefix authored by a different model, potentially inducing silent performance drift. We introduce a switch-matrix benchmark that measures this effect by running a prefix model for early turns and a suffix model for the final turn, and comparing against the no-switch baseline using paired episode-level bootstrap confidence intervals. Across CoQA conversational QA and Multi-IF benchmarks, even a single-turn handoff yields prevalent and statistically significant, d...
| Authors | Raad Khraishi, Iman Zafar, Katie Myles et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 March 2026 |
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