RADAR: Reasoning-Ability and Difficulty-Aware Routing for Reasoning LLMs

Reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable performance on many challenging tasks in math, science, and coding. Choosing the right reasoning model for practical deployment involves a performance-cost trade-off at two key levels: model size and reasoning budget, where larger models and higher reasoning budgets lead to better performance but incur greater cost and latency. In this work, we tackle this tradeoff from the angle of model configuration routing for different queries, and present RADAR (Reasoning–Ability and Difficulty-Aware Routing), a lightweight, interpretable, and scalable routing framework. Inspired by psychometrics, RADAR learns an item response model from model responses with different budgets to different queries, with interpretable parameters including query difficulties and model-budget abilities. RADAR then routes queries with higher difficulty to model-budget pairs with higher ability, and vice versa. We conduct extensive experiments on 8 widely used challenging reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating the superior performance of RADAR compared to state-of-the-art model routing methods. RADAR also exhibits query generalization capabilities, achieving strong performance on out-of-distribution queries on all benchmarks. RADAR is also scalable and can efficiently integrate additional models by dynamically selecting a small set of evaluation queries to estimate their abilities.