RouterEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Routing LLMs to Explore Model-level Scaling Up in LLMs
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Abstract (arXiv)
Routing large language models (LLMs) is a new paradigm that uses a router to recommend the best LLM from a pool of candidates for a given input. In this paper, our comprehensive analysis with more than 8,500 LLMs reveals a novel model-level scaling up phenomenon in Routing LLMs, i.e., a capable router can significantly enhance the performance of this paradigm as the number of candidates increases. This improvement can even surpass the performance of the best single model in the pool and many existing strong LLMs, confirming it a highly promising paradigm. However, the lack of comprehensive and open-source benchmarks for Routing LLMs has hindered the development of routers. In this paper, we introduce RouterEval, a benchmark tailored for router research, which includes over 200,000,000 performance records for 12 popular LLM evaluations across various areas such as commonsense reasoning, semantic understanding, etc., based on over 8,500 various LLMs. Using RouterEval, extensive evaluations of existing Routing LLM methods reveal that most still have significant room for improvement. See https://github.com/MilkThink-Lab/RouterEval for all data, code and tutorial.
Key facts. Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 113 of its 163 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.
Builds on
113 of 163 references.
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50 most cited of 113 All 113 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 17; 2026: 41.
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- 2025The Avengers: A Simple Recipe for Uniting Smaller Language Models to Challenge Proprietary Giantscited by 37
- 2026LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routingcited by 35
- 2025Beyond GPT-5: Making LLMs Cheaper and Better via Performance-Efficiency Optimized Routingcited by 32
- 2025Internet of Agents: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challengescited by 31
- 2025RouterArena: An Open Platform for Comprehensive Comparison of LLM Routerscited by 19
- 2026Dynamic Model Routing and Cascading for Efficient LLM Inference: A Surveycited by 16
- 2025Self-Resource Allocation in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 13
- 2025Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AIcited by 13
- 2026MMR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal LLM Routingcited by 13
- 2026R2-Router: A New Paradigm for LLM Routing with Reasoningcited by 13
- 2026When Routing Collapses: On the Degenerate Convergence of LLM Routerscited by 10
- 2026SWE-Router: Routing in Multi-turn Agentic Software Engineering Taskscited by 9
38 more
- 2026Budget-Aware Agentic Routing via Boundary-Guided Trainingcited by 8
- 2026Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Modelscited by 7
- 2026The Replay Gap: Static Evaluation of Model Switching in LLM Agents Scores the Wrong Worldcited by 7
- 2025VL-RouterBench: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Model Routingcited by 6
- 2025Towards Efficient Multi-LLM Inference: Characterization and Analysis of LLM Routing and Hierarchical Techniquescited by 5
- 2025IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offscited by 5
- 2025ProxRouter: Proximity-Weighted LLM Query Routing for Improved Robustness to Outlierscited by 5
- 2026PROTEUS: SLA-Aware Routing via Lagrangian RL for Multi-LLM Serving Systemscited by 4
- 2026RACER: Risk-Aware Calibrated Efficient Routing for Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2026Route to Rome Attack: Directing LLM Routers to Expensive Models via Adversarial Suffix Optimizationcited by 4
- 2026HAPS: Hierarchical LLM Routing with Joint Architecture and Parameter Searchcited by 3
- 2026Federate the Router: Learning Language Model Routers with Sparse and Decentralized Evaluationscited by 3
- 2026AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendationcited by 3
- 2026Judge, Then Drive: A Critic-Centric Vision Language Action Framework for Autonomous Drivingcited by 3
- 2026From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routingcited by 3
- 2026What Does a Routing Oracle Measure Under Stochastic Decoding? Coupling, Scorer Choice, and Single-Commit Ceilingscited by 3
- 2025Guarded Query Routing for Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Minimizing Mismatch Risk: A Prototype-Based Routing Framework for Zero-shot LLM-generated Text Detectioncited by 2
- 2026Towards Fair and Comprehensive Evaluation of Routers in Collaborative LLM Systemscited by 2
- 2026Task-Aware Delegation Cues for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026SeqRoute: Global Budget-Aware Sequential LLM Routing via Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
- 2026Most of the LLM Routing Gap Is Task Typecited by 2
- 2026Beyond Top-k Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2025LightRouter: Towards Efficient LLM Collaboration with Minimal Overheadcited by 1
- 2025R1-Ranker: Teaching LLM Rankers to Reasoncited by 1
- 2025DART: Dual Adaptive Refinement Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Recognitioncited by 1
- 2026ModelLens: Finding the Best for Your Task from Myriads of Modelscited by 1
- 2026BLUE: Toward Better Language Use in Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 1
- 2026RouteJudge: An Open Platform for Reproducible and Preference-Aware LLM Routingcited by 1
- 2026LLMRouter: Unified Infrastructure for Developing, Evaluating, and Deploying LLM Routerscited by 1
- 2025AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguitycited by 0
- 2025A Greedy PDE Router for Blending Neural Operators and Classical Methodscited by 0
- 2025RoBoN: Routed Online Best-of-n for Test-Time Scaling with Multiple LLMscited by 0
- 2026A self-evolving multi-role collaborative framework with fine-grained difficulty guidance for innovative mathematical problem generationcited by 0
- 2026Route-Induced Density and Stability (RIDE): Controlled Intervention and Mechanism Analysis of Routing-Style Meta Prompts on LLM Internal Statescited by 0
- 2026AgentOpt v0.1 Technical Report: Client-Side Optimization for LLM-Based Agentcited by 0
- 2026Resample or Reroute? Recoverable Stopping Debt Without Identified Action Selectioncited by 0
50 most cited of 58 All 58 (JSON)
- 2026TokenRouter: Efficient Serving System for Token-Level LLM Routing8 Oct 2026
- 2026What Makes Something Hard(er)? Explaining Question Difficulty in Natural Language1 Oct 2026
- 2026FlexRouter: Learning Complementary Model Sets for Flexible LLM Routing29 Sep 2026
- 2026Pretrain Once, Route Anywhere: Towards a Foundation Model for LLM Routing29 Sep 2026
- 2026Canopy: Exploiting Piecewise Smooth Tree Priors for Multi-Fidelity Bandits24 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Top-k Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agents5 Sep 2026
- 2026Are Near-Tied LLM Rankings Robust to Family-DIF-Guided Benchmark Recomposition?31 Aug 2026
- 2026Most of the LLM Routing Gap Is Task Type24 Aug 2026
- 2026RLCascadeRouter: Quality-Estimator-Free Cascade Routing via Reinforcement Learning16 Aug 2026
- 2026The Replay Gap: Static Evaluation of Model Switching in LLM Agents Scores the Wrong World8 Aug 2026
- 2026LLMRouter: Unified Infrastructure for Developing, Evaluating, and Deploying LLM Routers7 Aug 2026
- 2026Resample or Reroute? Recoverable Stopping Debt Without Identified Action Selection9 Jul 2026
38 more
- 2026Optimal Model Activation Policies for Inference Networks of Large Language Models7 Jul 2026
- 2026What Does a Routing Oracle Measure Under Stochastic Decoding? Coupling, Scorer Choice, and Single-Commit Ceilings3 Jul 2026
- 2026SWE-Router: Routing in Multi-turn Agentic Software Engineering Tasks30 Jun 2026
- 2026RouteJudge: An Open Platform for Reproducible and Preference-Aware LLM Routing17 Jun 2026
- 2026BLUE: Toward Better Language Use in Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving7 Jun 2026
- 2026From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routing5 Jun 2026
- 2026SeqRoute: Global Budget-Aware Sequential LLM Routing via Offline Reinforcement Learning25 May 2026
- 2026ModelLens: Finding the Best for Your Task from Myriads of Models8 May 2026
- 2026Judge, Then Drive: A Critic-Centric Vision Language Action Framework for Autonomous Driving30 Apr 2026
- 2026Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoning26 Apr 2026
- 2026Route to Rome Attack: Directing LLM Routers to Expensive Models via Adversarial Suffix Optimization16 Apr 2026
- 2026AgentOpt v0.1 Technical Report: Client-Side Optimization for LLM-Based Agent7 Apr 2026
- 2026Route-Induced Density and Stability (RIDE): Controlled Intervention and Mechanism Analysis of Routing-Style Meta Prompts on LLM Internal States31 Mar 2026
- 2026Task-Aware Delegation Cues for LLM Agents11 Mar 2026
- 2026AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation4 Mar 2026
- 2026Dynamic Model Routing and Cascading for Efficient LLM Inference: A Survey23 Feb 2026
- 2026RACER: Risk-Aware Calibrated Efficient Routing for Large Language Models20 Feb 2026
- 2026Towards Fair and Comprehensive Evaluation of Routers in Collaborative LLM Systems12 Feb 2026
- 2026Budget-Aware Agentic Routing via Boundary-Guided Training4 Feb 2026
- 2026When Routing Collapses: On the Degenerate Convergence of LLM Routers3 Feb 2026
- 2026R2-Router: A New Paradigm for LLM Routing with Reasoning2 Feb 2026
- 2026Minimizing Mismatch Risk: A Prototype-Based Routing Framework for Zero-shot LLM-generated Text Detection1 Feb 2026
- 2026Federate the Router: Learning Language Model Routers with Sparse and Decentralized Evaluations29 Jan 2026
- 2026PROTEUS: SLA-Aware Routing via Lagrangian RL for Multi-LLM Serving Systems27 Jan 2026
- 2026MMR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal LLM Routing25 Jan 2026
- 2026A self-evolving multi-role collaborative framework with fine-grained difficulty guidance for innovative mathematical problem generation16 Jan 2026
- 2026Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Models16 Jan 2026
- 2026LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing12 Jan 2026
- 2026HAPS: Hierarchical LLM Routing with Joint Architecture and Parameter Search9 Jan 2026
- 2025VL-RouterBench: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Model Routing29 Dec 2025
- 2025RoBoN: Routed Online Best-of-n for Test-Time Scaling with Multiple LLMs5 Dec 2025
- 2025Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI11 Nov 2025
- 2025ProxRouter: Proximity-Weighted LLM Query Routing for Improved Robustness to Outliers10 Oct 2025
- 2025RouterArena: An Open Platform for Comprehensive Comparison of LLM Routers30 Sep 2025
- 2025A Greedy PDE Router for Blending Neural Operators and Classical Methods29 Sep 2025
- 2025AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity17 Sep 2025
- 2025IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs8 Sep 2025
- 2025Beyond GPT-5: Making LLMs Cheaper and Better via Performance-Efficiency Optimized Routing18 Aug 2025
50 newest of 58 All 58 (JSON)
- 2025Internet of Agents: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challengescited by 31
- 2025Self-Resource Allocation in Multi-Agent LLM Systemscited by 13
- 2026SWE-Router: Routing in Multi-turn Agentic Software Engineering Taskscited by 9
- 2026Budget-Aware Agentic Routing via Boundary-Guided Trainingcited by 8
- 2026The Replay Gap: Static Evaluation of Model Switching in LLM Agents Scores the Wrong Worldcited by 7
- 2026AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendationcited by 3
- 2026Task-Aware Delegation Cues for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026Beyond Top-k Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026AgentOpt v0.1 Technical Report: Client-Side Optimization for LLM-Based Agentcited by 0
- 2026Beyond Top-k Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agents5 Sep 2026
- 2026The Replay Gap: Static Evaluation of Model Switching in LLM Agents Scores the Wrong World8 Aug 2026
- 2026SWE-Router: Routing in Multi-turn Agentic Software Engineering Tasks30 Jun 2026
- 2026AgentOpt v0.1 Technical Report: Client-Side Optimization for LLM-Based Agent7 Apr 2026
- 2026Task-Aware Delegation Cues for LLM Agents11 Mar 2026
- 2026AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation4 Mar 2026
- 2026Budget-Aware Agentic Routing via Boundary-Guided Training4 Feb 2026
- 2025Internet of Agents: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges12 May 2025
- 2025Self-Resource Allocation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems2 Apr 2025
- 2026R2-Router: A New Paradigm for LLM Routing with Reasoningcited by 13
- 2026Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Modelscited by 7
- 2026From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routingcited by 3
- 2026Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoningcited by 2
- 2025R1-Ranker: Teaching LLM Rankers to Reasoncited by 1
- 2025AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguitycited by 0
- 2025RoBoN: Routed Online Best-of-n for Test-Time Scaling with Multiple LLMscited by 0
- 2026From Sampled Outcomes to Capability Distributions: Rethinking Supervision for LLM Routing5 Jun 2026
- 2026Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoning26 Apr 2026
- 2026R2-Router: A New Paradigm for LLM Routing with Reasoning2 Feb 2026
- 2026Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Models16 Jan 2026
- 2025RoBoN: Routed Online Best-of-n for Test-Time Scaling with Multiple LLMs5 Dec 2025
- 2025AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity17 Sep 2025
- 2025R1-Ranker: Teaching LLM Rankers to Reason25 Jun 2025
- 2025The Avengers: A Simple Recipe for Uniting Smaller Language Models to Challenge Proprietary Giantscited by 37
- 2026LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routingcited by 35
- 2025Beyond GPT-5: Making LLMs Cheaper and Better via Performance-Efficiency Optimized Routingcited by 32
- 2025RouterArena: An Open Platform for Comprehensive Comparison of LLM Routerscited by 19
- 2025Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AIcited by 13
- 2026When Routing Collapses: On the Degenerate Convergence of LLM Routerscited by 10
- 2025Towards Efficient Multi-LLM Inference: Characterization and Analysis of LLM Routing and Hierarchical Techniquescited by 5
- 2025IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offscited by 5
- 2025ProxRouter: Proximity-Weighted LLM Query Routing for Improved Robustness to Outlierscited by 5
- 2026PROTEUS: SLA-Aware Routing via Lagrangian RL for Multi-LLM Serving Systemscited by 4
- 2026RACER: Risk-Aware Calibrated Efficient Routing for Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2026HAPS: Hierarchical LLM Routing with Joint Architecture and Parameter Searchcited by 3
12 most cited of 32 All 32 (JSON)
- 2026TokenRouter: Efficient Serving System for Token-Level LLM Routing8 Oct 2026
- 2026What Makes Something Hard(er)? Explaining Question Difficulty in Natural Language1 Oct 2026
- 2026FlexRouter: Learning Complementary Model Sets for Flexible LLM Routing29 Sep 2026
- 2026Pretrain Once, Route Anywhere: Towards a Foundation Model for LLM Routing29 Sep 2026
- 2026Canopy: Exploiting Piecewise Smooth Tree Priors for Multi-Fidelity Bandits24 Sep 2026
- 2026Are Near-Tied LLM Rankings Robust to Family-DIF-Guided Benchmark Recomposition?31 Aug 2026
- 2026Most of the LLM Routing Gap Is Task Type24 Aug 2026
- 2026RLCascadeRouter: Quality-Estimator-Free Cascade Routing via Reinforcement Learning16 Aug 2026
- 2026LLMRouter: Unified Infrastructure for Developing, Evaluating, and Deploying LLM Routers7 Aug 2026
- 2026Resample or Reroute? Recoverable Stopping Debt Without Identified Action Selection9 Jul 2026
- 2026Optimal Model Activation Policies for Inference Networks of Large Language Models7 Jul 2026
- 2026What Does a Routing Oracle Measure Under Stochastic Decoding? Coupling, Scorer Choice, and Single-Commit Ceilings3 Jul 2026
12 newest of 32 All 32 (JSON)
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