arXiv Machine Learning

Damage Predicts Recovery: When Calibration Data Matters in Compressing Financial LLMs

The paper investigates whether domain‑matched calibration data is necessary when compressing large language models for financial tasks. It finds that if compression causes little task damage, the choice of calibration corpus has minimal impact, whereas significant damage—especially from pruning—can be mitigated by using a finance‑specific calibration set (FinMix). The study tests this across multiple models, compression settings, and financial tasks, consistently supporting the link between damage and recovery.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

The Structure of Quantization Damage in LLMs: Why the Next Bit Should Be Spent Globally

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.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Data-Centric Post-Training for Financial Reasoning: Mining, Distillation, and Verifiable Learning

The paper introduces a data‑centric pipeline for post‑training language models on financial reasoning tasks. It mines open‑source reasoning traces, distills financial instruction data, and generates knowledge‑graph‑guided question‑answer pairs, then filters examples with lightweight classifiers and applies reinforcement learning with rule‑based verifiers. Experiments on FINESSE‑Bench show that retention‑aware adaptation—self‑distilled fine‑tuning and model merging—outperforms ordinary supervised fine‑tuning, improving accuracy by up to 3.0 points and avoiding regressions.

By Zhirayr Hayrapetyan, Andrei Kalmykov, Denis Kokosinskii, Dmitry Stanishevskii, Dmitry Zmitrovich