Best of Both Worlds: Fine-Tuned Small Models Complement LLMs for Cost and Performance Benefits

BERT-based models require thousands of labeled samples to train. Larger models like GPT-X require only 1-5 examples per class. However, performance, cost and time tradeoffs of such models remain under-explored. In this work, we classify survey text data into 16 classes. We focus on experimental approaches and results on performance, cost, and time taken for this problem. We compare these parameters of a trained RoBERTa-based model, and an (off-the-shelf) GPT-3.5 model for text classification. Baseline experiments show that the time taken by GPT-3.5 for generating predictions on 10,000 records is 6 hours, whereas a RoBERTa-based model takes only 12 mins on a T4 GPU. To identify the best prompting approach for GPT-3.5, we explore batch prompting. We experiment with (1) batch-size, and (2) few-shot sampling. We find the best batch size is 20 with human few-shot curation. Experiments show the F1 score of a trained RoBERTa-based model (96%) is much higher than a GPT-3.5 model (83%). In case of GPT-3.5, batch prompting is beneficial in lowering inference costs by 70%, without hindering task performance. We find the best approach is an ensemble of a RoBERTa-based and GPT-3.5 model (F1: 97.5%) incurring only 4.4% of inference cost compared to a standalone GPT-3.5.