AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning

Hao Sun, Jiayi Wu, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yue Feng, Bo Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yan Zhang, Dawei Yin


Abstract
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been remarkable. Users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality and deploying local-based LLMs for lower computational cost. The former option is typically costly and inefficient, while the latter usually fails to deliver satisfactory performance for reasoning steps requiring deliberate thought processes. In this work, we propose a novel LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates the collaborative operation of large cloud-based LLMs and smaller local-deployed LLMs. Our framework comprises two primary modules: the local agent instantiated with a relatively smaller LLM, handling less complex reasoning steps, and the cloud agent equipped with a larger LLM, managing more intricate reasoning steps. This collaborative processing is enabled through an adaptive mechanism where the local agent introspectively identifies errors and proactively seeks assistance from the cloud agent, thereby effectively integrating the strengths of both locally-deployed and cloud-based LLMs, resulting in significant enhancements in task completion performance and efficiency. We evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks, ranging from mathematical reasoning and complex question answering, using various types of LLMs to instantiate the local and cloud agents. The empirical results show that AdaSwitch effectively improves the performance of the local agent, and sometimes achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing much less computational overhead.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.458
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8052–8062
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.458
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hao Sun, Jiayi Wu, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yue Feng, Bo Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yan Zhang, and Dawei Yin. 2024. AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8052–8062, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning (Sun et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.458.pdf