Evaluating Quantized Large Language Models for Code Generation on Low-Resource Language Benchmarks

Democratization of AI is an important topic within the broader topic of the digital divide. This issue is relevant to LLMs, which are becoming popular as AI co-pilots but suffer from a lack of accessibility due to high computational demand. In this study, we evaluate whether quantization is a viable approach toward enabling LLMs on generic consumer devices. The study assesses the performance of five quantized code LLMs in Lua code generation tasks. To evaluate the impact of quantization, the models with 7B parameters were tested on a consumer laptop at 2-, 4-, and 8-bit integer precisions and compared to non-quantized code LLMs with 1.3, 2, and 3 billion parameters. Lua is chosen as a low-level resource language to avoid models' biases related to high-resource languages. The results suggest that the models quantized at the 4-bit integer precision offer the best trade-off between performance and model size. These models can be comfortably deployed on an average laptop without a dedicated GPU. The performance significantly drops at the 2-bit integer precision. The models at 8-bit integer precision require more inference time that does not effectively translate to better performance. The 4-bit models with 7 billion parameters also considerably outperform non-quantized models with lower parameter numbers despite having comparable model sizes with respect to storage and memory demand. While quantization indeed increases the accessibility of smaller LLMs with 7 billion parameters, these LLMs demonstrate overall low performance (less than 50%) on high-precision and low-resource tasks such as Lua code generation. While accessibility is improved, usability is still not at the practical level comparable to foundational LLMs such as GPT-4o or Llama 3.1 405B.