LLMComp2025: Small Language Model Optimization & Evaluation Framework

A comprehensive framework for evaluating, optimizing, and benchmarking Small Language Models (SLMs) with a focus on edge deployment, ONNX optimization, and robustness testing. This project provides extensive evaluation of 6 state-of-the-art small language models across multiple metrics including accuracy, inference time, memory usage, model size, and robustness.

🎯 Key Features

• Complete ONNX Pipeline: Export, optimize and evaluate models in ONNX format for production deployment
• Comprehensive Benchmarking: Multi-dimensional evaluation including clean accuracy, robustness testing, and performance metrics
• Energy Efficiency Analysis: Detailed energy consumption analysis across different hardware platforms (GPU, CPU, laptop, mobile)
• Edge Deployment Ready: Optimized for deployment on resource-constrained devices
• Robust Evaluation: Includes noise injection and adversarial testing to measure model robustness
• Automated Model Comparison: Side-by-side comparison of all models with detailed performance summaries

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or higher
• CUDA-compatible GPU (recommended for training)
• 16GB+ RAM (for larger models)
• 50GB+ disk space

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone <repository-url>
   cd LLMComp2025
   

2. Create and activate a virtual environment

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate  # On Linux/macOS
   # or venv\Scripts\activate on Windows
   

3. Install required packages

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

Quick Start

1. Evaluate a pre-trained model

   python test_models.py
   

2. Run ONNX evaluation on all models

   python src/evaluation/usecase3/final_comparison.py
   

3. Generate visualization plots

   python src/evaluation/usecase3/plots_ONNX/general_plots_onnx.py
   

4. Export a model to ONNX

   python src/onnx_env/usecase3/distilbert.py  # Replace with desired model
   

📊 Evaluation Results

Our comprehensive evaluation reveals the following performance characteristics:

Key Findings:

• Best Overall Performance: TinyLLaMA achieves the highest accuracy with good efficiency
• Fastest Inference: MobileLLaMA provides sub-millisecond inference times
• Most Robust: TinyLLaMA maintains 89% accuracy under adversarial conditions
• Most Energy Efficient: MobileLLaMA consumes the least energy per query

🧠 Supported Models

• Phi-3-mini: Microsoft's efficient 3.8B parameter model with 128K context
• TinyLLaMA-1.1B: Compact yet capable language model optimized for efficiency
• DistilBERT: Knowledge-distilled BERT with 66M parameters
• ALBERT: Parameter-efficient architecture with 12M parameters
• MobileBERT: Optimized BERT variant for mobile deployment
• MobileLLaMA: Mobile-optimized LLaMA variant for edge devices

🏗️ Project Structure

LLMComp2025/
├── README.md                    # This file
├── Documentation.md             # Detailed technical documentation
├── requirements.txt             # Python dependencies
├── run.py                      # Command-line interface
├── test_models.py              # Quick model testing script
├── config/                     # Configuration files
│   ├── config.json            # Model configurations
│   └── evaluation_config.py   # Evaluation settings
├── src/                       # Source code
│   ├── main.py               # Main entry point
│   ├── training/             # Training scripts for use cases
│   ├── evaluation/           # Evaluation and benchmarking
│   ├── onnx_env/            # ONNX export and optimization
│   └── utils/               # Utility functions
├── data/                      # Dataset storage
│   ├── raw/                  # Original datasets
│   └── processed/            # Preprocessed datasets
├── Data_scripts/              # Data preprocessing scripts
├── onnx_results_usecase3*/    # ONNX evaluation results
└── results_baseline_comparison/ # Baseline comparison results

📈 Evaluation Framework

Core Evaluation Metrics

• Accuracy: Classification performance on clean test data
• Robustness: Performance degradation under adversarial conditions (noise injection)
• Inference Time: Average time per prediction in milliseconds
• Model Size: Disk storage requirements in MB
• Memory Usage: Peak RAM consumption during inference
• Energy Efficiency: Power consumption per query across different hardware

ONNX Optimization Pipeline

1. Model Export: Convert PyTorch models to ONNX format
2. Optimization: Graph optimization and quantization
3. Validation: Ensure output consistency between frameworks
4. Benchmarking: Comprehensive performance evaluation

Robustness Testing

• Character-level noise injection (typos, substitutions)
• Input perturbation analysis
• Adversarial robustness evaluation
• Cross-dataset generalization testing

🔧 Usage Examples

Evaluate All Models

# Run complete ONNX evaluation pipeline
python src/evaluation/usecase3/final_comparison.py

# Generate comparative visualization
python src/evaluation/usecase3/plots_ONNX/general_plots_onnx.py

Export Individual Models to ONNX

# Export DistilBERT
python src/onnx_env/usecase3/distilbert.py

# Export ALBERT
python src/onnx_env/usecase3/albert.py

# Export TinyLLaMA
python src/onnx_env/usecase3/tinyllama.py

Model-Specific Evaluation

# Evaluate ALBERT with detailed metrics
python src/evaluation/usecase3/albert_eval.py

# Evaluate Phi-3 with robustness testing
python src/evaluation/usecase3/eval_phi3.py

Quick Interactive Testing

# Test any model interactively
python test_models.py
# Enter text when prompted to get real-time predictions

📊 Results and Insights

Performance vs Efficiency Trade-offs

• High Accuracy + Fast: TinyLLaMA offers the best balance
• Ultra-Fast Inference: MobileLLaMA for real-time applications
• Memory Efficient: ALBERT for resource-constrained environments
• Large Context: Phi-3-mini for complex reasoning tasks

Energy Consumption Analysis

Our energy analysis across different hardware platforms shows:

• Mobile Devices: MobileLLaMA consumes 10x less energy than Phi-3
• Laptops: DistilBERT provides best energy efficiency for mid-range performance
• Servers: All models show excellent GPU utilization

Robustness Findings

• Most Robust: TinyLLaMA maintains 95.7% of original performance under noise
• Least Robust: ALBERT shows 85.3% retention under adversarial conditions
• Noise Types: Character substitution has minimal impact vs. word-level corruption

🛠️ Advanced Features

Custom Model Integration

# Add your own model to the evaluation framework
from src.models import register_model

@register_model("your_model")
def load_your_model():
    # Model loading logic
    return model, tokenizer

Custom Evaluation Metrics

# Extend evaluation with custom metrics
from src.evaluation import add_custom_metric

@add_custom_metric
def custom_efficiency_score(predictions, ground_truth, inference_times):
    # Your metric calculation
    return score

Hardware-Specific Optimization

The framework supports optimization for different target devices:

• Mobile/Edge: Quantization + pruning for minimal footprint
• Desktop: Balanced optimization for speed/accuracy
• Server: Multi-batch optimization for throughput

📋 Requirements

System Requirements

• RAM: 16GB+ recommended (8GB minimum)
• Storage: 50GB+ for models and datasets
• GPU: CUDA-compatible (optional but recommended)
• CPU: Multi-core processor (4+ cores recommended)

Software Dependencies

See requirements.txt for complete list. Key dependencies:

• PyTorch >= 2.0.0
• Transformers >= 4.34.0
• ONNX >= 1.14.0
• ONNXRuntime >= 1.15.0
• scikit-learn >= 1.2.0
• pandas >= 2.0.0

🚀 Reproducibility

Running the Complete Evaluation

# 1. Set up environment
source venv/bin/activate

# 2. Run full evaluation pipeline
python src/evaluation/usecase3/final_comparison.py

# 3. Generate all plots and visualizations
python src/evaluation/usecase3/plots_ONNX/general_plots_onnx.py

# 4. Review results
ls onnx_results_usecase3/

Expected Outputs

• Model comparison CSV files
• Confusion matrices for each model
• Performance visualization plots
• Energy consumption analysis
• Individual model evaluation reports

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

👥 Contributors

🏆 Acknowledgments

This work was conducted as part of LLMComp2025, focusing on advancing the state of small language model optimization for practical deployment scenarios. Special thanks to the open-source community for providing the foundational models and tools that made this research possible.

📚 Citation

If you use this framework in your research, please cite:

@misc{llmcomp2025,
  title={LLMComp2025: Small Language Model Optimization \& Evaluation Framework},
  author={Saleem, Claudia and Elshabasy, Mostafa},
  year={2025},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/your-repo/LLMComp2025}}
}