Not All Tokens Are Equal: Inflation-Aware Routing for Agentic LLM Systems
When a language model fails to answer a query on the first attempt, an agentic system retries, consuming additional tokens each time. This retry overhead creates a gap between what a model's per-token price implies and what a full workflow actually costs. We call this gap \emph{token inflation} and define it as the ratio of true workflow cost to single-call cost. Systems like FrugalGPT route based on the latter, which can underestimate real cost by more than $2\times$ on difficult tasks. We address this with InflationAgent, a four-stage router that (1) measures token inflation systematically across model tiers and task types, finding inflation as high as $4.25\times$ for a 7B model on mul...
| Authors | Heming Fu, Shan Lin, Qianqian Xie et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 July 2026 |
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