Can You Check That? The Checkability Boundary for Local LLM Network Automation

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Article Summary

Sending every network-automation input to a third-party frontier LLM exports sensitive artifacts such as production configurations, topologies, and logs. Querying small language models (SLMs) locally avoids this egress, but SLM outputs can be error-prone for direct use. This work introduces checkability as a criterion for determining which tasks are suitable for local inference. A task is checkable when it exposes a cheap, deterministic test - an intrinsic check - that rejects outputs violating a necessary correctness condition. We instantiate this idea in Touchstone, a local-first pipeline that uses seven off-the-shelf SLMs (1-8B parameters) to generate candidates, uses task-specific intrinsic checks to reject responses, and escalates unresolved inputs to a frontier LLM. On conflict detection and intent translation tasks, Touchstone reaches 98.6% and 93.8% end-to-end accuracy while escalating only 16% and 17% of inputs, respectively. On TeleQnA, a knowledge-only control that has no task-specific intrinsic checks, Touchstone is unable to match the accuracy of the frontier baseline. Our results support a simple deployment rule: keep inference local when task semantics support precise, low-cost checks; escalate the rest.

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