Rethinking Quality in Large Language Model Routing: Security-Conditioned Model-and-Budget Selection

Yichi Zhang, Zhenxiang Huang, Yuyang Zhang, Yuchen Yang

Large language model (LLM) routers reduce serving cost by choosing which model to call and how many output tokens to grant it for each query. Existing routers rank model-budget actions using a single quality metric. This does not work for mixed workloads. For ordinary queries, a good answer is correct and useful (utility); for security-sensitive queries, a good answer refuses harmful requests or resists malicious instructions (security). These two objectives prefer different models and budgets. We propose SCRouter, a router that learns when to prioritize security and how to allocate the token budget. For each model-budget pair, it estimates the probability that the response finishes within budget. It uses this probability to predict utility and security separately. A small probe determines how to weight these two predictions for each query. SCRouter then selects the model and budget by balancing the weighted utility and security against cost. We also build SCRouterBench, a benchmark of 38,869 utility and security queries spanning nine security dimensions, each answered under all 144 combinations of 12 models and 12 budgets, plus 2,753 out-of-domain queries. SCRouter improves the…