# Design Methodology and Performance Trade-offs Management for Distributed and Compound AI Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01680/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Atlas: Optimizing Deployment of Compound AI Workflows on Heterogeneous Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04513/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems must typically satisfy service-level objectives including accuracy, latency, and cost. The prevailing model-centric approaches select a monolithic model at design time and apply identical computation regardless of input difficulty, cannot decompose tasks across specialized components, and have knowledge that is fixed at training time. During runtime, this can lead to performance degradation and increasing costs. Because the model is the main design variable, it determines the majority of system behavior, coupling operational objectives to a single design-time choice. Addressing these limitations requires shifting from model-centric to system-centric design. Compound AI systems realize this shift by orchestrating multiple models, algorithms, and tools as distributed AI systems through explicit control logic. The performance of such systems depends on their workflow topology, the models assigned to each task, and the parameters governing runtime behavior. We present a design methodology that organizes this space along two dimensions, workflow topology and configuration selection, and identifies eight design patterns, each consolidating techniques to address a specific limitation of monolithic deployment. We validate our methodology through three case studies. Across our case studies, Compound AI configurations approach accuracy of monolithic models within 2.5 to 4 percentage points while reducing latency by up to 60% and cost by up to 71%. We show that model selection and parameter configuration jointly determine system performance, but the resulting design space grows combinatorially, as workflows compose more patterns and components. Thus, we identify five open challenges that define a roadmap from manually configured prototypes towards systems that automatically discover and maintain SLO-compliance in Compound and Distributed AI systems.