The Shadow Price of Intelligence: Quality Degradation in LLM Inference as a Supply Chain Problem

arXiv:2608.23986 · math.OC, cs.AI, cs.PF · Submitted 2026-08-25 · Read on arXiv

math.OC, cs.AI, cs.PF

Submitted: 2026-08-25

Updated: 2026-08-29

Terminology

• Benchmark — 9× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Regret — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Pruning — 6× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Distillation — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 3× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Action Space — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agentic Workflows — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• QPLEX Decision Processes: Formulation via Nonlinear Markov Chains and Optimization via Policy Gradients

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