Publications

A Survey on Small Language Models

RANLP 2025

Publication date: September 10, 2025

Chien Van Nguyen, Xuan Shen, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Samyadeep Basu, Zhengmian Hu, Jian Chen, Mihir Parmar, Sasidhar Kunapuli, Joe Barrow, Junda Wu, Ashish Singh, Yu Wang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Nedim Lipka, Ruiyi Zhang, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Namyong Park, Michael Rimer, Zhehao Zhang, Huanrui Yang, Puneet Mathur, Gang Wu, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Thien Huu Nguyen

Small Language Models (SLMs) have become increasingly important due to their efficiency and performance to perform various language tasks with minimal computational resources, making them ideal for various settings including on-device, mobile, edge devices, among many others. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on SLMs, focusing on their architectures, training techniques, and model compression techniques. We propose a novel taxonomy for categorizing the methods used to optimize SLMs, including model compression, pruning, and quantization techniques. We summarize the benchmark datasets that are useful for benchmarking SLMs along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we highlight key open challenges that remain to be addressed. Our survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in developing and deploying small yet efficient language models.

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