Slimming Down LLMs Without Losing Their Minds

Qingda; Mai

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arXiv · 2506.10885

Slimming Down LLMs Without Losing Their Minds

Qingda·Mai

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Abstract

This paper investigates and validates the impact of fine-tuning on large language model performance, focusing on parameter-efficient methods (LoRA and QLoRA). We evaluate model capabilities across three key domains: (1) commonsense reasoning (HellaSwag), (2) mathematical reasoning (GSM8K), and (3) multi-domain knowledge (MMLU-CS). Our findings demonstrate that: (1) LoRA-based methods effectively improve task-specific performance while maintaining computational efficiency, and (2) performance strongly depends on alignment between fine-tuning dataset and benchmark tasks. The study provides both theoretical insights into parameter-efficient mechanisms and practical guidance for developers implementing efficient LLM adaptation with limited resources.

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Qingda, Mai. 2025-06-12. Slimming Down LLMs Without Losing Their Minds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10885

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