| { |
| "tldr": "Upgrades the one-dimensional FrugalGPT cascade to a two-dimensional (model-size x weight-precision) cost-quality frontier for self-hosted agentic tool-call routing, where one GPU-hour prices every grid cell. A closed-form crossing condition (rho^t * rho^Q > rho^l; shared-regime form D_c > xi/(1-xi)) predicts a category-inverted 'precision ladder' -- small full-precision on easy tasks, large low-bit on hard ones -- driven by byte parity (27B at 4.5 effective bits = 15.2 GB of weights vs 16.0 GB for 8B at 16 bits); a measured H100 NVL feasibility layer (BF16 peaks 7.5/15.3/27.5 GB of 93.6 GB, low-bit bitsandbytes paths unsupported) and a pre-registered R1-R4 protocol specify how the frontier cells will be settled.", |
| "problem": "For agentic tool-call tasks of graded difficulty (simple, parallel, agentic BFCL-style categories), a self-hosted operator must choose both the model tier (4B/8B/14B/27B dense Qwen3) and the weight precision (BF16/FP8/NVFP4). Under API pricing, FrugalGPT-style cascades optimize only the tier because the request price scales with it; on a single self-hosted GPU the price axis collapses (one GPU-hour covers any resident variant), the choice becomes two-dimensional, and it is open whether a quantized large model can beat a smaller full-precision model per successful task.", |
| "method": "Prices each (model, precision) cell by effective passing throughput E = tQ/l (passed tasks per GPU-second) under a judge-free BFCL-style code gate fixed at g = 0.85, so the cost per passed task is C = p_h/E and the routing entry is the gated argmax of E. The 2-D frontier is developed in closed form: it subsumes the 1-D cascade as its BF16-row projection (Theorem 1); the ladder-crossing condition rho^t * rho^Q > rho^l (Theorem 2) with the dividend-versus-cliff necessary form D_c > xi/(1-xi) (Corollaries 1-2); three category-inversion regimes (Proposition 1); and a hardware-transfer proposition (Proposition 2). Quality-decay inputs come from the measured tool-call cliff and the near-one throughput ratio from weights-only byte-parity arithmetic; a measured feasibility layer (checkpoint downloads, BF16 load and peak VRAM, low-bit stack compatibility) plus a pre-registered protocol with refutation criteria R1-R4 populate the cells.", |
| "contributions": [ |
| "System: a deployable per-category routing table ('precision ladder') for the ThakiCloud token factory -- the cheapest (model x precision) pair on the self-hosted fleet that passes the BFCL-style gate g = 0.85 -- composable with the zero-token skill router and queue-aware E-order tier fallback, and anchored by the 27B-NVFP4 production checkpoint at 89.6 percent overall on the 800-case BFCL-style suite.", |
| "Society: a quantification of when a quantized large model beats a smaller full-precision model at equal task quality, giving self-hosted operators a concrete recipe to cut per-task inference spend and the energy behind it.", |
| "Science: an upgrade of FrugalGPT-style 1-D cascades to the first joint 2-D (model-size x quantization-precision) cost-quality frontier for agentic tool-call workloads, with a closed-form crossing condition, a necessary dividend-versus-cliff inequality, category-structure regimes, a hardware-transfer proposition, and a pre-registered falsification protocol (P1-P3, R1-R4)." |
| ], |
| "results": "Analytical claims with a measured feasibility layer; no new per-cell quality or throughput measurements are reported. (i) The 2-D frontier weakly dominates the 1-D cascade, which is its BF16-row projection. (ii) In the byte-parity regime (27B NVFP4 15.2 GB vs 8B BF16 16.0 GB of weights, scenario rho^t = 0.95), the crossing flips by category: no crossing on simple (product 0.896 < 1) and crossing on agentic (product 1.064 > 1, about 6 percent lower cost per passed task) -- the predicted category-inverted routing table. (iii) Measured on the 93.6 GB H100 NVL node: BF16 4B/8B/14B peak at 7.5/15.3/27.5 GB (at least 70 percent headroom), load in 2.2/2.9/5.0 s, concurrent checkpoint downloads at about 171 s, total feasibility wall 189.8 s, and all six bitsandbytes 8/4-bit load attempts unsupported, so stack support -- not VRAM -- bounds the feasible set. (iv) The full 4x3 grid is memory-feasible on H100 NVL and a fortiori on the H200 deployment target.", |
| "limitations": "No per-cell quality-throughput grid measurements are reported, so the regime of Proposition 1 (ladder, empty, or low-bit-dominated) is undetermined until R1-R4 run and the Section 5.3 illustration is a scenario, not data; the grid is a single model family (dense Qwen3); the measured feasibility layer is on H100 NVL while the deployment target is H200, with the transfer conditional on beta_c proxies guarded by R4 (20 percent bound); the gate is fixed at g = 0.85; the shared-regime corollaries assume rho^l = 1 and rho^r = 1, so low-bit token inflation or silent-error growth raises the required dividend; and p_h uses cited public on-demand list prices (H100 $2.50, H200 $3.50, B200 $5.00, RTX 5070 $0.60 per GPU-hour).", |
| "tags": [ |
| "llm-quantization", |
| "model-tier-routing", |
| "cost-quality-frontier", |
| "agentic-tool-calling", |
| "llm-cascade", |
| "nvfp4", |
| "self-hosted-serving", |
| "bfcl" |
| ] |
| } |
|
|
