Abstract:We present RLM-Cascade, a proxy-layer system that applies speculative decoding at the response level to reduce LLM API costs without requiring model architecture access or a shared vocabulary. A fast, inexpensive draft model generates a candidate response; a capable verify model accepts, enhances, or is bypassed entirely depending on a lightweight complexity router. On a real-world agentic coding workload (Claude Code), RLM-Cascade achieves a draft-use rate of 88.8% across 125 production requests, reducing API cost by 45.8% relative to a direct Opus baseline. Counter-intuitively, the proxy also reduces end-to-end latency: median response time is 2,026 ms versus 3,698 ms for Native Opus -- a 1.83X speedup at p50 -- because the SKIPPED path (DeepSeek only, no Opus call) dominates the workload distribution. Quality matches or exceeds the Opus baseline: 100% pass rate on a 20-task Code/Math/Instruct benchmark versus 95% for Native Opus. We further describe a rule-based complexity router that selects the SKIPPED path for simple agentic turns and a hybrid tool-call strategy that bypasses the speculative pipeline for schema-critical tool-selection turns. RLM-Cascade is deployed in production as an enterprise AI infrastructure component and published as open source with a live metrics dashboard and Prometheus endpoint.
From: Haifeng Wu [view email]
[v1]
Mon, 22 Jun 2026 04:27:45 UTC (16 KB)
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