Tiny-Critic RAG: Empowering Agentic Fallback with Parameter-Efficient Small Language Models

The project addresses a known bottleneck in agentic RAG (latency/cost of LLM-as-a-judge). While the paper provides a systematic approach to using SLMs for routing, the strategy itself is a standard industry optimization. Frontier labs are already targeting this use case with 'mini' and 'flash' models, significantly reducing the unique value proposition of bespoke SLM critics.