@inproceedings{lai-etal-2026-sampled,
title = "From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for {LLM} Routing",
author = "Lai, Guannan and
Hu, Haoran and
Chen, Long and
Li, Zhenguo and
Ye, Han-Jia",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.333/",
pages = "7667--7688",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Existing LLM routing methods often construct supervision from a single sampled response for each query{--}model pair. Because LLM generation is stochastic, however, such an observation can be an unstable estimate of model capability: semantically equivalent query formulations and repeated decoding may yield different scores and even different model preferences. We show that this instability can further propagate from routing labels to learned routing policies. To address this issue, we propose **DARS** (Distribution-Aware Routing Supervision), which estimates query-level model capability from repeated observations spanning semantics-preserving query rewrites and stochastic decoding. DARS summarizes expected quality, expected cost, and performance variability to construct risk-aware supervision without changing the downstream router architecture. Experiments across diverse tasks and routing methods show that DARS generally improves routing utility and cost{--}quality trade-offs over single-shot supervision. Further analyses show that its benefits persist under moderate sampling budgets and different decoding temperatures. These results suggest that reliable LLM routing should move beyond individual sampled outcomes and instead model query-level capability distributions."
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<abstract>Existing LLM routing methods often construct supervision from a single sampled response for each query–model pair. Because LLM generation is stochastic, however, such an observation can be an unstable estimate of model capability: semantically equivalent query formulations and repeated decoding may yield different scores and even different model preferences. We show that this instability can further propagate from routing labels to learned routing policies. To address this issue, we propose **DARS** (Distribution-Aware Routing Supervision), which estimates query-level model capability from repeated observations spanning semantics-preserving query rewrites and stochastic decoding. DARS summarizes expected quality, expected cost, and performance variability to construct risk-aware supervision without changing the downstream router architecture. Experiments across diverse tasks and routing methods show that DARS generally improves routing utility and cost–quality trade-offs over single-shot supervision. Further analyses show that its benefits persist under moderate sampling budgets and different decoding temperatures. These results suggest that reliable LLM routing should move beyond individual sampled outcomes and instead model query-level capability distributions.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routing
%A Lai, Guannan
%A Hu, Haoran
%A Chen, Long
%A Li, Zhenguo
%A Ye, Han-Jia
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F lai-etal-2026-sampled
%X Existing LLM routing methods often construct supervision from a single sampled response for each query–model pair. Because LLM generation is stochastic, however, such an observation can be an unstable estimate of model capability: semantically equivalent query formulations and repeated decoding may yield different scores and even different model preferences. We show that this instability can further propagate from routing labels to learned routing policies. To address this issue, we propose **DARS** (Distribution-Aware Routing Supervision), which estimates query-level model capability from repeated observations spanning semantics-preserving query rewrites and stochastic decoding. DARS summarizes expected quality, expected cost, and performance variability to construct risk-aware supervision without changing the downstream router architecture. Experiments across diverse tasks and routing methods show that DARS generally improves routing utility and cost–quality trade-offs over single-shot supervision. Further analyses show that its benefits persist under moderate sampling budgets and different decoding temperatures. These results suggest that reliable LLM routing should move beyond individual sampled outcomes and instead model query-level capability distributions.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.333/
%P 7667-7688
Markdown (Informal)
[From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routing](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.333/) (Lai et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL