Ask Your Advisor: Learning When to Consult Stronger Models in Agentic Systems

To balance task performance and computational cost, agentic workflows can use a lower-cost model for execution and selectively consult a stronger model. In such executor–advisor systems, the executor decides when to seek advice, making escalation depend on self-assessment, although current language models struggle to detect where their own reasoning fails. The need for stronger reasoning emerges during execution and varies across workflow phases. We introduce ARIA, a meta-controller that learns when to consult by balancing task success against consultation cost. Our approach formulates consultation as a sequential resource-allocation problem. At workflow contact points, ARIA maps execution evidence to a compact state abstraction and selects SILENT or CONSULT, with action values learned by Monte Carlo control from cost-penalized outcomes. Across evaluated tasks of SWE-bench Verified, Terminal-Bench 2.1, and ${\tau }^2$-bench, ARIA recovers 44–81% of the executor-advisor success gap at less than half the advisor model’s cost. ARIA achieves the best observed success-cost trade-off among ten other evaluated conditions, including routing and cascading methods, fixed and prompted consultation, and random placement at matched advice volume. The policies are compact and inspectable, with a single consultation-price parameter governing the success–cost trade-off without retraining either underlying model.