Influence of Prompt Engineering on Small Language Models for Guarded Query Routing
We study the problem of guarded query routing, where we assume that a user query first meets a router that either determines the ideal endpoint for in-distribution queries or rejects out-of-distribution queries that are potentially unsafe or out of the system's scope. We investigate whether compact open-weight Small Language Models (SLMs) can jointly handle both tasks under latency constraints. We evaluate 22 models on GQR-Bench and score them with the harmonic mean of in-distribution and out-of-distribution accuracy. We find that mid-scale SLMs come close to frontier model routing quality at much lower latency. Still, many compact models fail because they do not reliably follow the requi...
| Authors | Richard Šléher, William Brach, Kristián Košťál et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 6 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 July 2026 |
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