{"ID":2841896,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11828","arxiv_id":"2511.11828","title":"Conformal Constrained Policy Optimization for Cost-Effective LLM Agents","abstract":"While large language models (LLMs) have recently made tremendous progress towards solving challenging AI problems, they have done so at increasingly steep computational and API costs. We propose a novel strategy where we combine multiple LLM models with varying cost/accuracy tradeoffs in an agentic manner, where models and tools are run in sequence as determined by an orchestration model to minimize cost subject to a user-specified level of reliability; this constraint is formalized using conformal prediction to provide guarantees. To solve this problem, we propose Conformal Constrained Policy Optimization (CCPO), a training paradigm that integrates constrained policy optimization with off-policy reinforcement learning and recent advances in online conformal prediction. CCPO jointly optimizes a cost-aware policy (score function) and an adaptive threshold. Across two multi-hop question answering benchmarks, CCPO achieves up to a 30% cost reduction compared to other cost-aware baselines and LLM-guided methods without compromising reliability. Our approach provides a principled and practical framework for deploying LLM agents that are significantly more cost-effective while maintaining reliability.","short_abstract":"While large language models (LLMs) have recently made tremendous progress towards solving challenging AI problems, they have done so at increasingly steep computational and API costs. We propose a novel strategy where we combine multiple LLM models with varying cost/accuracy tradeoffs in an agentic manner, where models...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11828","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11828v2","authors":"[\"Wenwen Si\",\"Sooyong Jang\",\"Insup Lee\",\"Osbert Bastani\"]","published":"2025-11-14T19:39:28Z","proceeding":"cs.LG","tasks":"[\"cs.LG\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Reinforcement Learning\",\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}