Explainable Model Routing for Agentic Workflows

Modern agentic workflows decompose complex tasks into specialized subtasks and route them to diverse models to minimize cost without sacrificing quality. However, current routing architectures focus exclusively on performance optimization, leaving underlying trade-offs between model capability and cost unrecorded. Without clear rationale, developers cannot distinguish between intelligent efficiency -- using specialized models for appropriate tasks -- and latent failures caused by budget-driven model selection. We present Topaz, a framework that introduces formal auditability to agentic routing. Topaz replaces silent model assignments with an inherently interpretable router that incorporates three components: (i) skill-based profiling that synthesizes performance across diverse benchmarks into granular capability profiles (ii) fully traceable routing algorithms that utilize budget-based and multi-objective optimization to produce clear traces of how skill-match scores were weighed against costs, and (iii) developer-facing explanations that translate these traces into natural language, allowing users to audit system logic and iteratively tune the cost-quality tradeoff. By making routing decisions interpretable, Topaz enables users to understand, trust, and meaningfully steer routed agentic systems.

Synapse: Evolving Job-Person Fit with Explainable Two-phase Retrieval and LLM-guided Genetic Resume Optimization

Modern recruitment platforms operate under severe information imbalance: job seekers must search over massive, rapidly changing collections of postings, while employers are overwhelmed by high-volume, low-relevance applicant pools. Existing recruitment recommender systems typically rely on keyword matching or single-stage semantic retrieval, which struggle to capture fine-grained alignment between candidate experience and job requirements under real-world scale and cost constraints. We present Synapse, a multi-stage semantic recruitment system that separates high-recall candidate generation from high-precision semantic reranking, combining efficient dense retrieval using FAISS with an ensemble of contrastive learning and Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. To improve transparency, Synapse incorporates a retrieval-augmented explanation layer that grounds recommendations in explicit evidence. Beyond retrieval, we introduce a novel evolutionary resume optimization framework that treats resume refinement as a black-box optimization problem. Using Differential Evolution with LLM-guided mutation operators, the system iteratively modifies candidate representations to improve alignment with screening objectives, without any labeled data. Evaluation shows that the proposed ensemble improves nDCG@10 by 22% over embedding-only retrieval baselines, while the evolutionary optimization loop consistently yields monotonic improvements in recommender scores, exceeding 60% relative gain across evaluated profiles. We plan to release code and data upon publication.

Trust by Design: Skill Profiles for Transparent, Cost-Aware LLM Routing

How should Large Language Model (LLM) practitioners select the right model for a task without wasting money? We introduce BELLA (Budget-Efficient LLM Selection via Automated skill-profiling), a framework that recommends optimal LLM selection for tasks through interpretable skill-based model selection. Standard benchmarks report aggregate metrics that obscure which specific capabilities a task requires and whether a cheaper model could suffice. BELLA addresses this gap through three stages: (1) decomposing LLM outputs and extract the granular skills required by using critic-based profiling, (2) clustering skills into structured capability matrices, and (3) multi-objective optimization to select the right models to maximize performance while respecting budget constraints. BELLA provides natural-language rationale for recommendations, providing transparency that current black-box routing systems lack. We describe the framework architecture, situate it within the landscape of LLM routing and evaluation, and discuss its application to financial reasoning as a representative domain exhibiting diverse skill requirements and cost-variation across models. Our framework enables practitioners to make principled and cost-performance trade-offs for deploying LLMs.

EarthSight: A Distributed Framework for Low-Latency Satellite Intelligence

Low-latency delivery of satellite imagery is essential for time-critical applications such as disaster response, intelligence, and infrastructure monitoring. However, traditional pipelines rely on downlinking all captured images before analysis, introducing delays of hours to days due to restricted communication bandwidth. To address these bottlenecks, emerging systems perform onboard machine learning to prioritize which images to transmit. However, these solutions typically treat each satellite as an isolated compute node, limiting scalability and efficiency. Redundant inference across satellites and tasks further strains onboard power and compute costs, constraining mission scope and responsiveness. We present EarthSight, a distributed runtime framework that redefines satellite image intelligence as a distributed decision problem between orbit and ground. EarthSight introduces three core innovations: (1) multi-task inference on satellites using shared backbones to amortize computation across multiple vision tasks; (2) a ground-station query scheduler that aggregates user requests, predicts priorities, and assigns compute budgets to incoming imagery; and (3) dynamic filter ordering, which integrates model selectivity, accuracy, and execution cost to reject low-value images early and conserve resources. EarthSight leverages global context from ground stations and resource-aware adaptive decisions in orbit to enable constellations to perform scalable, low-latency image analysis within strict downlink bandwidth and onboard power budgets. Evaluations using a prior established satellite simulator show that EarthSight reduces average compute time per image by 1.9x and lowers 90th percentile end-to-end latency from first contact to delivery from 51 to 21 minutes compared to the state-of-the-art baseline.