Efficient Clustering with Provable Guardrails for LLM Inference at Scale

Abstract

Scaling LLM-based applications to millions of users is bottlenecked by the inference cost and latency of modern foundation models. A natural fix is to cluster the inputs and call the LLM only on cluster representatives, letting other members inherit the output -- but this is only safe if each member is measurably close to its representative. Existing clustering methods do not offer such per-sample quality control at scale: none jointly guarantee a minimal within-cluster similarity, exact matching of categorical attributes, and scalability to tens of millions of samples. We propose a two-stage algorithm that generates initial clusters with Mini-batch K-Means, then greedily selects representatives within each initial cluster -- a step equivalent to the Johnson-Chvatal heuristic for Set Cover over alpha-balls in embedding space. The algorithm enforces the similarity and attribute guardrails exactly by construction, and runs in $O(nd + n^2 d/K)$ time and $O(nd + n^2/K^2)$ memory for $n$ samples, feature dimension $d$, and $K$ initial clusters -- linear in $n$ when $K$ grows proportionally with $n$. We provide benchmarks against common clustering methods on internal and public datasets: our method not only delivers per-sample guardrails but also runs 10-1000x faster and scales to data sizes where most standard methods become intractable. Deployed on 38 million customers for a persona-based recommender, the clustering method cut downstream cost and latency by 50-fold while preserving personalization and unblocked the production launch.