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arXiv · 2406.14051

How Many Parameters Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb? Evaluating Performance in Self-Play of Conversational Games as a Function of Model Characteristics

Nidhir Bhavsar·Jonathan Jordan·Sherzod Hakimov·David Schlangen
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Abstract

What makes a good Large Language Model (LLM)? That it performs well on the relevant benchmarks -- which hopefully measure, with some validity, the presence of capabilities that are also challenged in real application. But what makes the model perform well? What gives a model its abilities? We take a recently introduced type of benchmark that is meant to challenge capabilities in a goal-directed, agentive context through self-play of conversational games, and analyse how performance develops as a function of model characteristics like number of parameters, or type of training. We find that while there is a clear relationship between number of parameters and performance, there is still a wide spread of performance points within a given size bracket, which is to be accounted for by training parameters such as fine-tuning data quality and method. From a more practical angle, we also find a certain degree of unpredictability about performance across access methods, possible due to unexposed sampling parameters, and a, very welcome, performance stability against at least moderate weight quantisation during inference.

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Nidhir Bhavsar, Jonathan Jordan, Sherzod Hakimov, David Schlangen. 2024-06-20. How Many Parameters Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb? Evaluating Performance in Self-Play of Conversational Games as a Function of Model Characteristics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14051

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