Democratizing AI with Small Language Models: Structured Benchmarking and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Local Deployment

arXiv:2607.16202v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI democratization is not primarily a question of matching frontier-scale generality; it is a question of whether capable models can be selected, audited, and specialized under hardware and governance constraints that ordinary institutions can actually satisfy. This paper studies that problem through a controlled evaluation of nine open-weight language models between 135M and 3B parameters on a 1,085-example, 16-topic multiple-choice benchmark designed for structured local deployment. The benchmark emphasizes symbolic precision, constrained formatting, extraction, and short-horizon semantic decision making under a strict one-letter output protocol. A shared parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipeline then adapts a subset of models using…