Papers › Cache me if you Can: an Online Cost-aware Teacher-Student framework to Reduce the...
Cache me if you Can: an Online Cost-aware Teacher-Student framework to Reduce the Calls to Large Language Models
Ilias Stogiannidis, Stavros Vassos, Prodromos Malakasiotis, Ion Androutsopoulos
Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) performs impressively in zero- and few-shot settings. Hence, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that cannot afford the cost of creating large task-specific training datasets, but also the cost of pretraining their own LLMs, are increasingly turning to third-party services that allow them to prompt LLMs. However, such services currently require a payment per call, which becomes a significant operating expense (OpEx). Furthermore, customer inputs are often very similar over time, hence SMEs end-up prompting LLMs with very similar instances. We propose a framework that allows reducing the calls to LLMs by caching previous LLM responses and using them to train a local inexpensive model on the SME side. The framework includes criteria for deciding when to trust the local model or call the LLM, and a methodology to tune the criteria and measure the tradeoff between performance and cost. For experimental purposes, we instantiate our framework with two LLMs, GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, and two inexpensive students, a k-NN classifier or a Multi-Layer Perceptron, using two common business tasks, intent recognition and sentiment analysis. Experimental results indicate that significant OpEx savings can be obtained with only slightly lower performance.
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691f8679fc4e3729 · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intent Detection | BANKING77 | OCaTS (kNN-GPT-4) | Accuracy (%) | 82.7 | #2 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sentiment Analysis | IMDb | OCaTS (kNN & GPT-3.5-turbo | Accuracy | 93.06 | #29 of 49 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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