One Size Does Not Fit All: Setting Inference Depth from the Questions a Deployment Actually Asks

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.14144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A transformer language model is trained to respond to any prompt, but each deployment asks only a narrow range of questions: a support assistant sees delivery complaints, a coding tool sees Python. Every deployment nonetheless pays the same computation per token. This paper measures how much of that cost is avoidable when the range of prompts is known in advance. The mechanism examined is early exit: a small, trained component - called a readout - is attached to an intermediate layer and proposes a token, and a confidence test decides whether to emit it or to run the remaining layers. The models are frozen, and the only supervision used is the model's own output on ordinary traffic. Three findings are reported. First, achievable savings dep