The Role of Small Models

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What is the Role of Small Models in the LLM Era: A Survey
Lihu Chen1
Gaël Varoquaux2
1 Imperial College London, UK
2 Soda, Inria Saclay, France
Content List
Collaboration
SMs Enhance LLMs
Data Curation
Curating pre-training data
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| Data selection for language models via importance resampling | Data Selection |
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| When Less is More: Investigating Data Pruning for Pretraining LLMs at Scale | Data Selection |
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| CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data | Data Selection |
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| QuRating: Selecting High-Quality Data for Training Language Models | Data Selection |
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| DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining | Data Reweighting |
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Curating Instruction-tuning Data
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| MoDS: Model-oriented Data Selection for Instruction Tuning | Data Selection |
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| LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning | Data Selection |
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| What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction Tuning | Data Selection |
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Weak-to-Strong Paradigm
Using weaker (smaller) models to align stronger (larger) models
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision | Weak-to-Strong |
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| Weak-to-Strong Search: Align Large Language Models via Searching over Small Language Models | Weak-to-Strong |
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| Co-Supervised Learning: Improving Weak-to-Strong Generalization with Hierarchical Mixture of Experts | Weak-to-Strong |
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| Improving Weak-to-Strong Generalization with Reliability-Aware Alignment | Weak-to-Strong |
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| Aligner: Efficient Alignment by Learning to Correct | Weak-to-Strong |
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| Vision Superalignment: Weak-to-Strong Generalization for Vision Foundation Models
| Weak-to-Strong |
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| Theoretical Analysis of Weak-to-Strong Generalization
| Weak-to-Strong |
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Efficient Inference
Ensembling different-size models to reduce inference costs
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| Efficient Edge Inference by Selective Query | Model Cascading |
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| FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance | Model Cascading |
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| Data Shunt: Collaboration of Small and Large Models for Lower Costs and Better Performance | Model Cascading |
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| AutoMix: Automatically Mixing Language Models | Model Cascading |
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| FrugalML: How to use ML Prediction APIs more accurately and cheaply | Model Cascading |
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| Model Cascading: Towards Jointly Improving Efficiency and Accuracy of NLP Systems | Model Cascading |
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| Routing to the Expert: Efficient Reward-guided Ensemble of Large Language Models | Model Routing |
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| Tryage: Real-time, intelligent Routing of User Prompts to Large Language Models | Model Routing |
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| OrchestraLLM: Efficient Orchestration of Language Models for Dialogue State Tracking | Model Routing |
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| RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data | Model Routing |
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| Fly-Swat or Cannon? Cost-Effective Language Model Choice via Meta-Modeling | Model Routing |
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| Hybrid LLM: Cost-Efficient and Quality-Aware Query Routing
| Model Routing |
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| LLM-BLENDER: Ensembling Large Language Models
with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusion
| Model Routing |
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| RouterBench: A Benchmark for Multi-LLM Routing System
| Model Routing |
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| Large Language Model Routing with Benchmark Datasets
| Model Routing |
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Speculative Decoding
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding | Speculative Decoding |
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| Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding | Speculative Decoding |
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| Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling | Speculative Decoding |
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Evaluating LLMs
Using SMs to evaluate LLM's generations
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT | General Evaluation |
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| BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation | General Evaluation |
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| Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation | Uncertainty |
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| Selfcheckgpt: Zero-resource black-box hallucination detection for generative large language models | Uncertainty |
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| ProxyLM: Predicting Language Model Performance on Multilingual Tasks via Proxy Models | Performance Prediction |
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Domain Adaptation
Using domain-specific SMs to adjust token probability of LLMs at decoding time
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| CombLM: Adapting Black-Box Language Models through Small Fine-Tuned Models | White-box Domain Adaptation |
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| Inference-Time Policy Adapters (IPA): Tailoring Extreme-Scale LMs without Fine-tuning | White-box Domain Adaptation |
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| Tuning Language Models by Proxy | White-box Domain Adaptation |
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Using domain-specific SMs to generate knowledge for LLMs at reasoning time
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| Knowledge Card: Filling LLMs' Knowledge Gaps with Plug-in Specialized Language Models | Black-box Domain Adaptation |
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| BLADE: Enhancing Black-box Large Language Models with Small Domain-Specific Models | Black-box Domain Adaptation |
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Retrieval Augmented Generation
Using SMs to retrieve knowledge for enhancing generations:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks | Documents |
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| KnowledGPT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Retrieval and Storage Access on Knowledge Bases | Knowledge Bases |
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| End-to-End Table Question Answering via Retrieval-Augmented Generation | Tables |
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| DocPrompting: Generating Code by Retrieving the Docs | Codes |
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| Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools | Tools |
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| Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling | Images |
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Prompt-based Reasoning
Using SMs to augment prompts for LLMs
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation | Retrieving Prompts |
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| Small Language Models Fine-tuned to Coordinate Larger Language Models improve Complex Reasoning | Decomposing Complex Problems |
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| Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models | Generating Pseudo Labels |
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| Can Small Language Models Help Large Language Models Reason Better?: LM-Guided Chain-of-Thought | Generating Pseudo Labels |
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| CaLM: Contrasting Large and Small Language Models to Verify Grounded Generation
| Generating Feedback |
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| Small Language Models Improve Giants by Rewriting Their Outputs | Generating Feedback |
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Deficiency Repair
Developing SM plugins to repair deficiencies:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector | Hallucinations |
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| Reconfidencing LLMs from the Grouping Loss Perspective | Hallucinations |
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| Imputing Out-of-Vocabulary Embeddings with LOVE Makes LanguageModels Robust with Little Cost | Out-Of-Vocabulary Words |
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Contrasting LLMs and SMs for better generations:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
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| Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization | Reducing Repeated Texts |
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| Alleviating Hallucinations of Large Language Models through Induced Hallucinations | Mitigating Hallucinations |
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| Contrastive Decoding Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models | Augmenting Reasoning Capabilities |
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| CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following | Safeguarding Privacy |
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LLMs Enhance SMs
Knowledge Distillation
Black-box Distillation:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| Explanations from Large Language Models Make Small Reasoners Better | Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models
with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes | Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| Distilling Reasoning Capabilities into Smaller Language Models | Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| Teaching Small Language Models to Reason | Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| Symbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation: Small Models Can Also "Think" Step-by-Step
| Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning | Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| TinyLLM: Learning a Small Student from Multiple Large Language Models
| Chain-Of-Thought Distillation |
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| Lion: Adversarial Distillation of Proprietary Large Language Models | Instruction Following Distillation |
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| Selective Reflection-Tuning: Student-Selected Data Recycling for LLM Instruction-Tuning | Instruction Following Distillation |
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White-box Distillation:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter | Logits |
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| ZeroQuant: Efficient and Affordable Post-Training Quantization for Large-Scale Transformers | Intermediate Features |
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| Less is More: Task-aware Layer-wise Distillation for Language Model Compression | Intermediate Features |
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| MiniLLM: Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models | Intermediate Features |
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| LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models | Intermediate Features |
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Data Synthesis
Data Augmentation:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| Improving data augmentation for low resource speech-to-text translation with diverse paraphrasing | Text Paraphrase |
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| Paraphrasing with Large Language Models | Text Paraphrase |
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| Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models | Query Rewriting |
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| LLMvsSmall Model? Large Language Model Based Text Augmentation Enhanced Personality Detection Model | Specific Tasks |
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| Data Augmentation for Intent Classification with Off-the-shelf Large Language Models | Specific Tasks |
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| Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Through Prompting for Dialogue Understanding | Specific Tasks |
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Training Data Generation:
| Title | Topic | Venue | Code |
|---|
| Want To Reduce Labeling Cost? GPT-3 Can Help | Label Annotation |
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| Self-Guided Noise-Free Data Generation for Efficient Zero-Shot Learning | Label Annotation |
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| ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation | Dataset Generation |
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| Generating Training Data with Language Models: Towards Zero-Shot Language Understanding | Dataset Generation |
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| Increasing Diversity While Maintaining Accuracy: Text Data Generation with Large Language Models and Human Interventions | Dataset Generation |
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| Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations | Dataset Generation |
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| Does Synthetic Data Generation of LLMs Help Clinical Text Mining? | Dataset Generation |
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| Exploiting Asymmetry for Synthetic Training Data Generation: SynthIE and the Case of Information Extraction | Dataset Generation |
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| ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection | Dataset Generation |
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Competition
Computation-constrained Environment
Task-specific Environment
Interpretability-required Environment
Citation
@misc{chen2024rolesmallmodelsllm,
title={What is the Role of Small Models in the LLM Era: A Survey},
author={Lihu Chen and Gaël Varoquaux},
year={2024},
eprint={2409.06857},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06857},
}