Small Language Models

Also known as SLM

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Overview

Researchers build small language models by training compact models from scratch, distilling larger teachers, or adapting open models with supervised fine-tuning, LoRA/QLoRA, preference optimization, and quantization. To extend their capabilities, systems combine them with retrieval, tools, structured reasoning, verification, or selective handoff to larger models, particularly for edge, private, and latency-sensitive use. Evaluations span reasoning and coding benchmarks such as GSM8K and SWE-bench, structured tasks such as Spider and BIRD text-to-SQL, and domains including medicine, law, and low-resource languages. Specialized small models can be efficient and competitive, but results depend on the task: grounding retrieved context, reliable multi-step reasoning, safety, and generalization remain challenges, alongside trade-offs among accuracy, latency, memory, energy, and cost.

Latest papers

CardsList

277 papers42 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. SLM Finetuning for Natural Language to Domain Specific Code Generation in Production

    Apr 10, 2026Renjini R. Nair, Damian K. Kowalczyk, Marco Gaudesi +1Code GenerationFine-Tuning

    Microsoft

  2. RightNow-Arabic-0.5B-Turbo: An Open Sub-1B Arabic Language Model via Vocabulary Injection and Edge-First Deployment

    Apr 10, 2026Jaber Jaber, Osama JaberLanguage Model Vocabulary ExpansionArabic Language Models

    RightNow AI

  3. Limits of Difficulty Scaling: Hard Samples Yield Diminishing Returns in GRPO-Tuned SLMs

    Apr 7, 2026Suraj Yadav, Siddharth Yadav, Parth GoyalRL for Language Model ReasoningSmall Language Models

    IIIT Delhi

  4. Search, Do not Guess: Teaching Small Language Models to Be Effective Search Agents

    Apr 6, 2026Yizhou Liu, Qi Sun, Yulin Chen +2Agentic SearchSmall Language Models

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · New York University · Nanyang Technological University

  5. A Semi-Automated Annotation Workflow for Paediatric Histopathology Reports Using Small Language Models

    Apr 5, 2026Avish Vijayaraghavan, Jaskaran Singh Kawatra, Sebin Sabu +11Clinical Information ExtractionClinical NLP

    Division of Systems Medicine, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, Imperial College London, London, UK. · Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK. · Data Science Team, NHS England, Leeds & London, UK. +2

  6. Extracting and Steering Emotion Representations in Small Language Models: A Methodological Comparison

    Apr 5, 2026Jihoon JeongEmotion Representation in Language ModelsSmall Language Models

    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) ModuLabs

  7. Entropy and Attention Dynamics in Small Language Models: A Trace-Level Structural Analysis on the TruthfulQA Benchmark

    Apr 4, 2026Adeyemi Adeseye, Aisvarya Adeseye, Hannu Tenhunen +1Small Language ModelsLLM Honesty

    Brilloconnetz Partners avoin yhtiö, Turku, Finland · University of Turku, Turku, Finland · Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

  8. Do We Need Bigger Models for Science? Task-Aware Retrieval with Small Language Models

    Apr 2, 2026Florian Kelber, Matthias Jobst, Yuni Susanti +1AI-Assisted Scientific ResearchRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    TU Dresden, Germany · FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany · ScaDS.AI, TU Dresden, Germany

  9. More Human, More Efficient: Aligning Annotations with Quantized SLMs

    Apr 1, 2026Jiayu Wang, Junyoung LeeLLM-Assisted AnnotationLLM Fine-Tuning

    Home Team Science and Technology Agency

  10. Baby Scale: Investigating Models Trained on Individual Children's Language Input

    Mar 31, 2026Steven Y. Feng, Alvin W. M. Tan, Michael C. FrankLanguage Model ScalingSmall Language Models

    Stanford University

  11. GUARD-SLM: Token Activation-Based Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks for Small Language Models

    Mar 28, 2026Md Jueal Mia, Joaquin Molto, Yanzhao Wu +1Jailbreak DefenseJailbreak Detection

    Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences Florida International University Miami, FL, USA · Security, Optimization, and Learning for InterDependent networks laboratory (solid lab) Florida International University Miami, FL, USA

  12. Analysing Lightweight Large Language Models for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition on Diverse Ouput Formats

    Mar 27, 2026Pierre Epron, Adrien Coulet, Mehwish AlamNamed Entity RecognitionLLM Information Extraction

    HeKA | U1346, DIG · Inria, Inserm, Université Paris Cité, HeKA, UMR 1346, Paris, France · Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France +2

  13. Can Small Models Reason About Legal Documents? A Comparative Study

    Mar 26, 2026Snehit VaddiSmall Language ModelsLegal Reasoning

    Independent Researcher

  14. Evaluating Small Language Models for Front-Door Routing: A Harmonized Benchmark and Synthetic-Traffic Experiment

    Mar 26, 2026Warren Johnson, Charles LeeLLM RoutingSmall Language Models

    Plexor Labs, Sammamish, WA, USA · Project Autobots, Seattle, WA, USA

  15. Polaris: A Gödel Agent Framework for Small Language Models through Experience-Abstracted Policy Repair

    Mar 24, 2026Aditya Kakade, Vivek Srivastava, Shirish KarandeSmall Language ModelsSelf-Improving Agents

    TCS Research, India

  16. Optimizing Small Language Models for NL2SQL via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning

    Mar 24, 2026Anshul Solanki, Sanchit Latawa, Koushik Chakraborty +1Text-to-SQLFine-Tuning

    Google AI, Global Services Delivery

  17. EnterpriseLab: A Full-Stack Platform for developing and deploying agents in Enterprises

    Mar 23, 2026Ankush Agarwal, Harsh Vishwakarma, Suraj Nagaje +1Enterprise AI AgentsSynthetic Data Generation for LLM Agents

    Fujitsu Research India.

  18. Task-Specific Efficiency Analysis: When Small Language Models Outperform Large Language Models

    Mar 22, 2026Jinghan Cao, Yu Ma, Xinjin Li +2Small Language ModelsEfficient Language Model Inference

    San Francisco State University - Department of Computer Science 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco - USA · Carnegie Mellon University - Department of Computer Science 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh - USA · Columbia University - Department of Computer Science 116th and Broadway, New York - USA +2

  19. SozKZ: Training Efficient Small Language Models for Kazakh from Scratch

    Mar 21, 2026Saken TukenovLanguage Model PretrainingSmall Language Models

    Independent Researcher

  20. DeEscalWild: A Real-World Benchmark for Automated De-Escalation Training with SLMs

    Mar 20, 2026Md Hasebul Hasan, Krity Haque Charu, Eshwara Prasad Sridhar +2Small Language ModelsAgent Skill Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, USA · Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, USA

  21. An Empirical Study of SFT-DPO Interaction and Parameterization in Small Language Models

    Mar 20, 2026Yuming Feng, Christy YangDirect Preference OptimizationSupervised Fine-Tuning

    Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

  22. TharuChat: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for a Low-Resource Language via Synthetic Data and Human Validation

    Mar 17, 2026Prajwal Panth, Agniva MaitiLow-Resource Language ProcessingSynthetic Data Generation for Language Models

    School of Computer Engineering, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, India

  23. Exploring different approaches to customize language models for domain-specific text-to-code generation

    Mar 17, 2026Luís Freire, Fernanda A. Andaló, Nicki Skafte DetlefsenCode GenerationLLM Code Generation

    Technical University of Denmark · The LEGO Group

  24. PlotTwist: A Creative Plot Generation Framework with Small Language Models

    Mar 17, 2026Abhinav Thorat, Ravi Kolla, Jyotin Goel +2Narrative GenerationSmall Language Models

    Sony Research India

  25. Not All Invariants Are Equal: Curating Training Data to Accelerate Program Verification with SLMs

    Mar 16, 2026Ido Pinto, Yizhak Yisrael Elboher, Haoze Wu +2Fine-TuningTraining Data Curation

    Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel · Amherst Col · VMware Research by Broadcom, USA.

  26. CLAG: Adaptive Memory Organization via Agent-Driven Clustering for Small Language Model Agents

    Mar 16, 2026Taeyun Roh, Wonjune Jang, Junha Jung +1Agent MemoryAgent Memory Management

    Korea University · Myongji University · AIGEN Sciences

  27. Multilingual TinyStories: A Synthetic Combinatorial Corpus of Indic Children's Stories for Training Small Language Models

    Mar 15, 2026Deepon Halder, Angira MukherjeeSynthetic Data Generation for Language ModelsLow-Resource Language Processing

    AI4Bharat, IIEST Shibpur · IIEST Shibpur

  28. Tool-MCoT: Tool Augmented Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Content Safety Moderation

    Mar 15, 2026Shutong Zhang, Dylan Zhou, Yinxiao Liu +3Multimodal Content ModerationContent Moderation

    Stanford University, USA · Google LLC, USA

  29. Adapting Methods for Domain-Specific Japanese Small LMs: Scale, Architecture, and Quantization

    Mar 12, 2026Takato YasunoLanguage ModelingSmall Language Models

  30. Can Small Language Models Use What They Retrieve? An Empirical Study of Retrieval Utilization Across Model Scale

    Mar 12, 2026Sanchit PandeyRetrieval-Augmented GenerationKnowledge Augmentation for Language Models

    BITS Pilani, Hyderabad, India · BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, Telangana, India