Evaluating large language model compression: a comparative analysis on state-of-the-art models across diverse hardware platforms

Abstract

This work presents a systematic, empirical comparison of contemporary compression techniques for large language models (LLMs), namely quantization, pruning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using a representative set of open-source model families (Llama, Mistral, Phi and Qwen) and model scales (1.7 Billion to 70 Billion). Evaluation combined benchmarks (MMLU, SQuAD v2, TinyBenchmarks and WikiText), deployment metrics (peak memory, time-to-first-token, tokens/sec and maximum sequence lengths) and settings (multi-GPU clusters, single-GPU PC, laptop, and smartphone) to capture real-world trade-offs. Quantization often delivered the best wins for deployment feasibility—enabling single-device and mobile inference—but required careful per-model tuning and backend support to avoid throughput regressions. Pruning reduced parameter counts substantially but frequently incured large, even catastrophic, performance loss beyond moderate sparsity levels. Retraining partially mitigated this but did not uniformly close the gap to quantization. Finally, PEFT methods enabled models to match or outperform models with up to 18 times the parameters on SQuAD v2 while reducing storage as well as optimizer overhead and often improved task performance even when full fine-tuning failed.