Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing but pose significant challenges for real-world deployment. These models necessitate considerable computing resources, which can be costly and frequently unavailable. Model compression techniques such as quantization are often leveraged to alleviate resource demand, but they may have a negative impact on the generation quality. In this study, we explore the integration of 4-bit Post-training Quantization (PTQ) with QLoRA to address these issues. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that this integration outperforms standard PTQ, and in some cases even 16-bit full-parameter fine-tuning on LLMs, validated across proprietary and public datasets with different quantization algorithms. The results demonstrate the efficacy of PTQ-QLoRA integration, offering a viable solution for deploying powerful LLMs in resource-constrained environments without compromising on performance.

This work focuses on the task of query-based meeting summarization in which the summary of a context (meeting transcript) is generated in response to a specific query. When using Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task, a new call to the LLM inference endpoint/API is required for each new query even if the context stays the same. However, repeated calls to the LLM inference endpoints would significantly increase the costs of using them in production, making LLMs impractical for many real-world use cases. To address this problem, in this paper, we investigate whether combining the queries for the same input context in a single prompt to minimize repeated calls can be successfully used in meeting summarization. In this regard, we conduct extensive experiments by comparing the performance of various popular LLMs: GPT-4, PaLM-2, LLaMA-2, Mistral, and FLAN-T5 in single-query and multi-query settings. We observe that while most LLMs tend to respond to the multi-query instructions, almost all of them (except GPT-4), even after fine-tuning, could not properly generate the response in the required output format. We conclude that while multi-query prompting could be useful to optimize the inference costs by reducing calls to the inference endpoints/APIs for the task of meeting summarization, this capability to reliably generate the response in the expected format is only limited to certain LLMs.

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.