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Overview & Research Questions

Paper: CIKM Short Paper - Knowing When to Correct: Cost-Aware LLM Routing
Authors: Stergios Konstantinidis, Hayman Lotfy, Michalis Vlachos (University of Lausanne)
Venue: ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) - Short Paper
GitHub: https://github.com/Stergios-Konstantinidis/CIKM_public
Overleaf: https://git.overleaf.com/6a1d78e803cbdf7def32a839


CIKM Short Paper: Knowing When to Correct

Venue: ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
Authors: Stergios Konstantinidis, Hayman Lotfy, Michalis Vlachos
Affiliation: Department of Information Systems (DESI), HEC Lausanne
GitHub Public: CIKM_public
Overleaf Project: https://git.overleaf.com/6a1d78e803cbdf7def32a839
Core Codebase: /Users/stergios/Documents/GitHub/Optimizing-LLM-based-OCR-Corrections


1. Problem Statement

At multi-million page scale, LLM-based OCR correction is constrained by cost:

  • Full LLM correction costs hundreds of thousands of dollars on national archival collections.
  • Many archival passages are already accurate; invoking LLMs on them introduces latency, cost, and risk of hallucinations.

Core Research Questions:

  • RQ1: How closely does selective routing match the theoretical oracle ceiling, and does it outperform naive confidence thresholding?
  • RQ2: How well does the regression-estimated improvement $\hat{\Delta}_i$Δ}_i correlate with the true realized improvement $\Delta_i$Δi?
  • RQ3: What is the actual operational cost saved when routing only segments predicted to benefit across various frontier LLMs?

Problem Visual Illustration

[![

cikm_ocr_example.png

Figure: cikm_ocr_example.png](https://wiki.stergios.ch/uploads/images/gallery/2026-09/scaled-1680-/cikm-ocr-example.png)](https://wiki.stergios.ch/uploads/images/gallery/2026-09/cikm-ocr-example.png)png

Figure 1: Typical OCR degradation in historical periodicals requiring cost-aware routing.