In plain words: They tested whether small, cheap-to-run models can summarize meetings as well as big ones, training the small ones on meeting data while the big ones got none. Most fell short, but one small model matched or beat models up to 70 billion parameters.
Abstract · Tiny Titans: Can Smaller Large Language Models Punch Above Their Weight in the Real World for Meeting Summarization?
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities to solve a wide range of tasks without being explicitly fine-tuned on task-specific datasets. However, deploying LLMs in the real world is not trivial, as it requires substantial computing resources. In this paper, we investigate whether smaller, compact LLMs are a good alternative to the comparatively Larger LLMs2 to address significant costs associated with utilizing LLMs in the real world. In this regard, we study the meeting summarization task in a real-world industrial environment and conduct extensive experiments by comparing the performance of fine-tuned compact LLMs (e.g., FLAN-T5, TinyLLaMA, LiteLLaMA) with zero-shot larger LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2, GPT-3.5, PaLM-2). We observe that most smaller LLMs, even after fine-tuning, fail to outperform larger zero-shot LLMs in meeting summarization datasets. However, a notable exception is FLAN-T5 (780M parameters), which performs on par or even better than many zero-shot Larger LLMs (from 7B to above 70B parameters), while being significantly smaller. This makes compact LLMs like FLAN-T5 a suitable cost-efficient solution for real-world industrial deployment.
Xue-Yong Fu, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Elena Khasanova, Cheng Chen, Shashi Bhushan TN
arXiv:2402.00841 · cs.CL · submitted Feb 1, 2024 · updated Apr 15, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by NAACL 2024 (Industry Track). The first two authors contributed equally to this work