Complexity Horizons of Compressed Models in Analog Circuit Analysis

Abstract: The deployment of LLMs for specialized engineering domains, such as circuit analysis, often faces a trade-off between reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency. Traditional evaluation methods treat model performance as a flat metric, failing to account for the hierarchical nature of engineering knowledge. We propose a performance-aware model compression strategy that utilizes prerequisite graphs to optimize model selection for circuit analysis tasks. By structuring electronics design concepts as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), we can identify the specific complexity horizons of an LLM's compressed variants' tiers. Our framework introduces an agentic pipeline for generating prerequisite-based datasets and a strategic evaluation engine that dynamically cascades queries across a spectrum of compressed variants of an LLM. This approach allows to select the smallest compressed model, given its conceptual knowledge boundaries in circuit analysis. Experimental results on analog electronics datasets demonstrate that prerequisite graphs provide a granular map of model compression with respect to the performance given circuit analysis complexity. (Source Code: https://github.com/pacomesimon/LLM_prereq_graphs_circuit_analysis, Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/pacomesimon/LLM_prereq_graphs_circuit_analysis)