Near-Optimal Online Deployment and Routing for Streaming LLMs

Shaoang Li, Jian Li

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

The rapid pace at which new large language models (LLMs) appear, and older ones become obsolete, forces providers to manage a streaming inventory under a strict concurrency cap and per-query cost budgets. We cast this as an online decision problem that couples *stage-wise deployment* (at fixed maintenance windows) with *per-query routing* among live models. We introduce *StageRoute*, a hierarchical algorithm that (i) optimistically selects up to $M_{\max}$ models for the next stage using reward upper-confidence and cost lower-confidence bounds, and (ii) routes each incoming query by solving a budget- and throughput-constrained bandit subproblem over the deployed set. We prove a regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{2/3})$ with a matching lower bound, establishing near-optimality, and validate the theory empirically: *StageRoute* tracks a strong oracle under tight budgets across diverse workloads.