# Scaling Open-Weight Large Language Models for Hydropower Regulatory Information Extraction: A Systematic Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11821 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11821/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
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- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
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- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.5778/) (2013)
- [The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models -- An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04988/) (2023)
- [Self-contradictory Hallucinations of Large Language Models: Evaluation, Detection and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15852/) (2023)
- [Improving the Reliability of LLMs: Combining CoT, RAG, Self-Consistency, and Self-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09031/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Information extraction from regulatory documents using large language models presents critical trade-offs between performance and computational resources. We evaluated seven open-weight models (0.6B-70B parameters) on hydropower licensing documentation to provide empirical deployment guidance. Our analysis identified a pronounced 14B parameter threshold where validation methods transition from ineffective (F1 < 0.15) to viable (F1 = 0.64). Consumer-deployable models achieve 64% F1 through appropriate validation, while smaller models plateau at 51%. Large-scale models approach 77% F1 but require enterprise infrastructure. We identified systematic hallucination patterns where perfect recall indicates extraction failure rather than success in smaller models. Our findings establish the first comprehensive resource-performance mapping for open-weight information extraction in regulatory contexts, enabling evidence-based model selection. These results provide immediate value for hydropower compliance while contributing insights into parameter scaling effects that generalize across information extraction tasks.