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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14766 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14766/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Model Compression for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07633/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [LLM Lies: Hallucinations are not Bugs, but Features as Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01469/) (2023)
- [SPoC: Search-based Pseudocode to Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04908/) (2019)
- [Beyond Functional Correctness: Exploring Hallucinations in LLM-Generated Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00971/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Quantized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18158/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Code Quality of AI-Assisted Code Generation Tools: An Empirical Study on GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10778/) (2023)
- [The De-democratization of AI: Deep Learning and the Compute Divide in Artificial Intelligence Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15581/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Evaluation of Quantization Strategies for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16775/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Transfer from High-Resource to Low-Resource Programming Languages for Code LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09895/) (2023)
- [McEval: Massively Multilingual Code Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07436/) (2024)
- [AI-assisted coding: Experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13187/) (2023)
- [When to Stop? Towards Efficient Code Generation in LLMs with Excess Token Prevention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20042/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Quantitative Analysis of Performance Drop in DeepSeek Model Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02390/) (2025)
- [CangjieBench: Benchmarking LLMs on a Low-Resource General-Purpose Programming Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14501/) (2026)
- [Quantize with Confidence? An Empirical Study of Quantization for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14181/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.