# Benchmarking Trustworthiness of SLMs: Pre-trained vs. Compressed

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08295/) (2024)
- [A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11695/) (2023)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11627/) (2023)
- [SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02737/) (2025)
- [TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05561/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Adversarial GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Robustness Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02840/) (2021)
- [Security and Privacy Challenges of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00888/) (2024)
- [DuQuant: Distributing Outliers via Dual Transformation Makes Stronger Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01721/) (2024)
- [Exploiting LLM Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18137/) (2024)
- [Decoding Compressed Trust: Scrutinizing the Trustworthiness of Efficient LLMs Under Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15447/) (2024)
- [MobiLlama: Towards Accurate and Lightweight Fully Transparent GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16840/) (2024)
- [QuantVLA: Scale-Calibrated Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20309/) (2026)
- [Quantization Meets dLLMs: A Systematic Study of Post-training Quantization for Diffusion LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14896/) (2025)
- [DopQ-ViT: Towards Distribution-Friendly and Outlier-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03291/) (2024)
- [LRQ-DiT: Log-Rotation Post-Training Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03485/) (2025)
- [EfficientLLM: Scalable Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Architecture-Agnostic Edge Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06663/) (2025)
- [Prune as You Generate: Online Rollout Pruning for Faster and Better RLVR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24840/) (2026)
- [DuQuant++: Fine-grained Rotation Enhances Microscaling FP4 Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17789/) (2026)
- [H2O-Danube3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09276/) (2024)
- [MedREK: Retrieval-Based Editing for Medical LLMs with Key-Aware Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13500/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02108/) (2026)
- [STEPQuant: When and Where Errors Matter in Delta-Rule Recurrent State Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38169/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a more efficient alternative to traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), offering promising potential in resource-constrained scenarios. Existing approaches to building SLMs typically follow two paths: training compact models from scratch, or compressing larger pre-trained models using methods such as pruning, quantization, or distillation. As language models become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their trustworthiness has become a critical concern. However, how to build trustworthy SLMs remains an underexplored question. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of SLM trustworthiness across multiple dimensions, including fairness, robustness, privacy, and ethics. We first examine the effects of pruning and quantization, and find that quantization is significantly more effective in preserving trustworthiness compared to pruning. More importantly, we demonstrate that compressing a reliable large model via quantization can produce SLMs with superior trustworthiness and adaptability compared to using small models trained from scratch. Furthermore, knowledge distillation from trustworthy teacher models can further enhance the reliability of SLMs. We hope our findings provide practical guidance and a foundation for future research into the development and deployment of trustworthy small language models.