# Performance Trade-offs of Optimizing Small Language Models for E-Commerce

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21970/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [DynamoLLM: Designing LLM Inference Clusters for Performance and Energy Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00741/) (2024)
- [AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03502/) (2024)
- [Goat: Fine-tuned LLaMA Outperforms GPT-4 on Arithmetic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14201/) (2023)
- [How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09598/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Data Generation Using Large Language Models: Advances in Text and Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14023/) (2025)
- [Energy Considerations of Large Language Model Inference and Efficiency Optimizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17674/) (2025)
- [Intriguing Properties of Quantization at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19268/) (2023)
- [LoRA Land: 310 Fine-tuned LLMs that Rival GPT-4, A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00732/) (2024)
- [DoRA: Enhancing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Dynamic Rank Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17357/) (2024)
- [Quantization Meets Reasoning: Exploring LLM Low-Bit Quantization Degradation for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03035/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Language Models as Synthetic Data Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03679/) (2024)
- [ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04266/) (2025)
- [StructEval: Benchmarking LLMs' Capabilities to Generate Structural Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20139/) (2025)
- [The Price of Prompting: Profiling Energy Use in Large Language Models Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16893/) (2024)
- [StructuredRAG: JSON Response Formatting with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11061/) (2024)
- [Characterizing LLM Inference Energy-Performance Tradeoffs across Workloads and GPU Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08219/) (2025)
- [Think Inside the JSON: Reinforcement Strategy for Strict LLM Schema Adherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14905/) (2025)
- [CLONE: Customizing LLMs for Efficient Latency-Aware Inference at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02847/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Trade-Offs: Quantization Methods, Task Difficulty, and Model Size in Large Language Models From Edge to Giant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11055/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization in LLMs: Comprehensive Taxonomy, Unified Evaluation, and Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13178/) (2025)
- [LiLiuM: eBay's Large Language Models for e-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12023/) (2024)
- [MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12563/) (2025)
- [TeLLMe: An Energy-Efficient Ternary LLM Accelerator for Prefilling and Decoding on Edge FPGAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16266/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unifying Data, Memory, and Compute Efficiency in LLM training: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10706/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer state-of-the-art performance in natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, the deployment of leading commercial models for specialized tasks, such as e-commerce, is often hindered by high computational costs, latency, and operational expenses. This paper investigates the viability of smaller, open-weight models as a resource-efficient alternative. We present a methodology for optimizing a one-billion-parameter Llama 3.2 model for multilingual e-commerce intent recognition. The model was fine-tuned using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) on a synthetically generated dataset designed to mimic real-world user queries. Subsequently, we applied post-training quantization techniques, creating GPU-optimized (GPTQ) and CPU-optimized (GGUF) versions. Our results demonstrate that the specialized 1B model achieves 99% accuracy, matching the performance of the significantly larger GPT-4.1 model. A detailed performance analysis revealed critical, hardware-dependent trade-offs: while 4-bit GPTQ reduced VRAM usage by 41%, it paradoxically slowed inference by 82% on an older GPU architecture (NVIDIA T4) due to dequantization overhead. Conversely, GGUF formats on a CPU achieved a speedup of up to 18x in inference throughput and a reduction of over 90% in RAM consumption compared to the FP16 baseline. We conclude that small, properly optimized open-weight models are not just a viable but a more suitable alternative for domain-specific applications, offering state-of-the-art accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost.