A Comprehensive Survey of Small Language Models in the Era of Large Language Models: Techniques, Enhancements, Applications, Collaboration with LLMs, and Trustworthiness

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent abilities in text generation, question answering, and reasoning, facilitating various tasks and domains. Despite their proficiency in various tasks, LLMs like PaLM 540B and Llama-3.1 405B face limitations due to large parameter sizes and computational demands, often requiring cloud API use, which raises privacy concerns, limits real-time applications on edge devices, and increases fine-tuning costs. Additionally, LLMs often underperform in specialized domains such as healthcare and law due to insufficient domain-specific knowledge, necessitating specialized models. Therefore, Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly favored for their low inference…

• AR
  Army Research Office

  Award: W911NF21-1-0198