L3iTC at the FinLLM Challenge Task: Quantization for Financial Text Classification & Summarization
This work addresses efficiency challenges in applying LLMs to financial NLP tasks, but it is incremental as it adapts existing quantization methods to a specific domain.
The authors tackled financial text classification and summarization by fine-tuning large language models with 4-bit quantization and LoRA to optimize performance and reduce GPU memory usage, achieving third place in classification with an F1-score of 0.7543 and sixth place in summarization.
This article details our participation (L3iTC) in the FinLLM Challenge Task 2024, focusing on two key areas: Task 1, financial text classification, and Task 2, financial text summarization. To address these challenges, we fine-tuned several large language models (LLMs) to optimize performance for each task. Specifically, we used 4-bit quantization and LoRA to determine which layers of the LLMs should be trained at a lower precision. This approach not only accelerated the fine-tuning process on the training data provided by the organizers but also enabled us to run the models on low GPU memory. Our fine-tuned models achieved third place for the financial classification task with an F1-score of 0.7543 and secured sixth place in the financial summarization task on the official test datasets.