Deterministic Inference at Scale: Moving Beyond Agents and MoE in Regulated Workloads

Deterministic Inference at Scale: Moving Beyond Agents and MoE in Regulated Workloads

Context

We are clearly in the Age of Inference.

In many enterprise and regulated workloads, inference already dominates total AI cost and operational complexity.

The main blockers we encounter today are not:

model quality,

GPU availability,

or training capability.

They are

non-deterministic outputs,

lack of auditability and replayability,

and rising TCO during inference and validation, especially when agents or MoE-style systems are involved.

In regulated environments, this becomes a hard stop.

This post shares how we approached this problem in practice by designing an inference-first, deterministic LLM architecture integrated directly into decision engines, instead of agent-based orchestration.

Problem Statement

Most agent-based or MoE-driven systems introduce:

probabilistic branching

non-reproducible reasoning paths,

implicit state accumulation,

and high validation overhead.

These properties are problematic when

outputs must be auditable,

decisions must be replayable,

and every inference must map to a concrete business or operational action.

The question we asked was simple:

How do we run LLM inference as a deterministic decision component, not as a conversational or autonomous agent?

Architecture Overview

Model:

Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct

Fully fine-tuned (not LoRA-only inference adapters)

Long-context enabled with

rope_theta = 500,000

Output Contract:

The model is constrained to strict JSON-only output.

Example:

{“risk_score”: 0.32}

No prose.

No explanations.

No latent reasoning exposed at inference time.

This enables:

machine-consumable outputs,

direct integration into decision logic,

deterministic downstream execution.

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ Input Signals │

│ (Telemetry / Context / KPIs)│

└──────────────┬───────────────┘

            │

            ▼

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ Pre-Processing Layer │

│ - Normalization │

│ - Schema Validation │

│ - Context Window Assembly │

└──────────────┬───────────────┘

            │

            ▼

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ LLM Inference Service │

│ Llama-3.3-70B (Fine-Tuned) │

│ rope_theta = 500k │

│ │

│ OUTPUT CONSTRAINT: │

│ JSON ONLY (No Prose) │

└──────────────┬───────────────┘

            │

            ▼

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ Determinism Gate │

│ - Schema Enforcement │

│ - Decoding Constraints │

│ - Hard Fail on Deviation │

└──────────────┬───────────────┘

            │

            ▼

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ Decision Logic Layer │

│ - Rules │

│ - Thresholds │

│ - Doctrine Constraints │

└──────────────┬───────────────┘

            │

            ▼

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ Execution / Action Layer │

│ - Workflow Trigger │

│ - Policy Enforcement │

│ - System Response │

└──────────────┬───────────────┘

            │

            ▼

┌──────────────────────────────┐

│ Audit & Replay Store │

│ - Input Hash │

│ - Model Version │

│ - Output JSON │

│ - Decision Trace │

└──────────────────────────────┘

Determinism Enforcement

Determinism is enforced at multiple layers:

1. Prompt & schema enforcement

Output schema validation

Hard failure on schema deviation

2. Inference configuration

Fixed decoding parameters

No stochastic sampling at decision endpoints

3. Decision boundary separation

LLM produces scores or structured outputs only

Decision logic remains external (rules engine / DMN)

4. Replayability

Same inputs → same outputs

Decision traces stored with full context hashes

This approach eliminates the “black box” behavior commonly seen in agent-based flows.

Cost & MLOps Observations

One surprising outcome was how low validation cost can be when determinism is enforced.

Validation metrics (representative):

Full fine-tune completed

Long-context reasoning enabled

Marginal validation TCO < 10 EUR

Key factors:

No agent loops

No recursive inference chains

No MoE routing overhead

No human-in-the-loop verification for outputs

Validation becomes a batchable, automatable process, not an interactive one.

Deployment Model

Designed as NIM-style microservices

Target infrastructure:

A100 / H100

Stateless inference endpoints

Explicit input/output contracts

This aligns well with NVIDIA’s HPC / NIM philosophy, but shifts the abstraction level from:

“model-as-a-service”

to

“decision primitive as a service”

Beyond MoE → MoSE (Mixture of Specialized Experts)

Instead of dynamic expert routing inside a single model, we deploy specialized deterministic services, each with:

its own schema,

its own validation rules,

its own decision domain.

Examples:

Financial risk scoring

Physiological readiness scoring

Behavioral co-regulation signals

Resilience / capacity modeling

All are orchestrated by the same deterministic control plane.

Why This Matters

As inference workloads grow, systems that rely on:

probabilistic agents,

hidden reasoning chains,

or emergent behaviors

become increasingly difficult to:

validate,

certify,

and operate at scale.

In our experience, deterministic inference primitives + external orchestration scale better than autonomous agent frameworks in regulated contexts.

Open Questions to the Community

We’re interested in hearing from others working on inference-heavy systems:

Are you enforcing deterministic outputs from LLMs in production?

How are you validating replayability at scale on A100/H100?

Has anyone integrated LLM inference directly into BPMN/DMN or similar decision engines?

Happy to exchange notes.

This system is part of the BPM RED Academy – MightHub initiative, focused on deterministic human–machine orchestration and inference-first AI systems.

Edin Vučelj - Military-Grade AI Systems Orchestration Architect

Creator of FinC2E – Cognitive Compliance Engine | Human-Centered AI Innovation COM @ BPM RED Academy (HumAI HQ Track&Board DigitalTwin Ecosystem)

Hi @bpm_red_academy, interesting approach. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the forum.

I’ve got one question, is taking this approach actually deterministic, or just moving the unpredictability one layer down in abstraction?

JSON output gives you schema, but the values can still vary:

  • Run 1: {"risk_score": 0.52}
  • Run 2: {"risk_score": 0.40}

If your threshold is 0.50, your downstream logic breaks. You’re enforcing the format, but the numeric output is still probabilistic.

I assume you’re using greedy decoding (temp=0) to get replayability. But that’s auditability, not stability. The value itself can still be wrong or sensitive to minor input changes.

Is that a fair read, or is there something in your fine-tuning that addresses value stability directly?

Keeping this thread open, would love to hear how others in the community are tackling this.

Thanks for the post.

Great question — and yes, that’s a fair read if determinism stops at

“JSON + temp=0”.

We don’t treat the LLM output as a final decision or a threshold-crossing

signal by itself.

A few clarifications on where determinism actually comes from in our setup:

  1. Replayability vs value stability

Greedy decoding gives us replayability, but we agree it does not guarantee

numerical stability under small input perturbations.

That’s why the raw model output is never consumed directly by downstream

logic.

  1. Scoring vs decision separation

The LLM acts as a scoring primitive, not a decision-maker.

Downstream logic operates on:

- calibrated score bands,

- rolling aggregates,

- and hysteresis rules,

not on single-point thresholds.

So a 0.40 → 0.52 fluctuation does not directly flip execution paths.

  1. Fine-tuning focus

Fine-tuning is oriented toward:

- monotonicity (directional consistency),

- reduced variance under semantically equivalent inputs,

- and output compression into bounded, interpretable ranges.

We don’t claim the model itself becomes mathematically deterministic.

Determinism emerges at the system level, through calibration,

decision buffering, and explicit control logic.

In short:

LLMs remain probabilistic.

Systems don’t have to be.

Appreciate the question — this is exactly the line we’re trying to draw

explicitly rather than hide behind prompts or agents.