The paper compares the sustainability of native small language models (SLMs) versus large language models (LLMs) compressed via post‑training quantization for edge AI deployment. Using a Holistic Sustainability Score (HSS) that balances capability, efficiency, and safety, the study evaluates 30 configurations across five benchmarks, latency, VRAM, energy, and harmful‑prompt robustness. Results show that optimized quantized LLMs can outperform SLMs overall, while SLMs remain competitive due to lower resource demands, challenging the assumption that native SLMs are always the most sustainable choice.
Post-training quantization lowers the memory footprint of Large Language Models (LLMs) and speeds up inference, which is why it is now common for on-device deployment. Most of what we know about its e...
The paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating whether off‑the‑shelf small language models (SLMs) can reliably perform microtasks that support a large language model (LLM) planner, such as auto‑approving shell commands, writing memory, selecting tools, and ranking past turns. Using fixed prompts and confidence‑interval‑aware eligibility thresholds, the authors test several Qwen3 models (0.6/1.7/4/8 B) in FP16 with no tuning and find that none of the 16 configurations meet the eligibility criteria. Quantization to 4‑bit precision further degrades performance, with the eligibility gap tracking model size rather than precision, and the issue persists across different models (e.g., Llama‑3.x) and prompt variations.
arXiv:2607. 16202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI democratization is not primarily a question of matching frontier-scale generality; it is a question of whether capable models can be selected, audited, and specialized under hardware and governance constraints that ordinary institutions can actually satisfy.
arXiv:2608. 15693v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large AI models on resource-constrained edge devices requires model compression to reduce model size and computation.
arXiv:2609.37887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation and key-value cache precision change what a quantized language model computes without altering its stored weights. Direct weight-code bounds...
The paper investigates where post‑training quantization (PTQ) harms large language models (LLMs) and how to best allocate a limited precision budget. By causally raising each layer to 8‑bit precision across nine open‑weight models, the authors find that quantization damage is diffuse rather than concentrated in specific task circuits or weight statistics, and that globally refining quantization granularity outperforms selectively protecting the most recoverable layers. They also observe that the residual accuracy loss is budget‑limited and that peak recovery locations correlate with architecture within families but not across families.
arXiv:2606. 07810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as judges for evaluating model outputs, but their high cost, latency, and opacity limit scalability.
arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.
arXiv:2607. 25583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and low-bit quantization are now standard tools for adapting language models under tight compute budgets, yet their interaction is most often studied on billion-parameter models where the design space is expensive to explore.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and low-bit quantization are now standard tools for adapting language models under tight compute budgets, yet their interaction is most often studied on billion-parameter models where the design space is expensive to explore. We ask a complementary question: on a specific, fully reproducible 60M-parameter encoder-decoder model (T5-small) and a single-table text-to-SQL benchmark (WikiSQL), how much task accuracy does each efficiency knob actually cost?
arXiv:2609.36654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models make weight storage and memory traffic major inference costs, motivating low-precision formats that represent each weight with on...
arXiv:2608.28809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extreme low-bit inference offers a route toward smaller models and constrained deployment. Ternary language models restrict weights to $\{-1,0,+1\}$, a...