Little Brains, Big Feats: Exploring Compact Language Models

Dari Baturova, Bruches Elena, Ivan, Roman Derunets, Arsenii Fomin, Andrey Kostin

Little Brains, Big Feats: Exploring Compact Language Models: 15 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #20 of 37 papers on 2026-07-01. Day-by-day upvote history.

While large language models have been dominating the research landscape recently, small language models remain highly relevant across various domains; yet, they receive far less attention. In this study, we investigate how smaller language models perform during the generation stage within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. To benchmark these models effectively, we utilised both open-source and proprietary datasets covering diverse subject areas and question types. Our findings demonstrate that a RAG system with small language models can be executed directly on-device without requiring any GPU hardware within a reasonable time. The experimental code and links to the supplementary materials can be accessed through the GitHub repository: https://github.com/SibNN/SLM-RAG-EVAL.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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