CommitLLM: Pipeline with Fine-Tuned Mistral-7B Generates Concise, Compliant Git Commit Messages
CommitLLM is a three-stage pipeline that generates concise, Conventional Commits-compliant messages from code diffs using a fine-tuned Mistral-7B model. The system combines QLoRA fine-tuning, constrained decoding, and deterministic post-processing, achieving 98% format compliance and reducing average output length from 154.8 to 37.9 characters. Evaluation shows that post-processing contributes more to quality improvement than fine-tuning alone, and the system runs on a single consumer GPU.
Why it matters: This work demonstrates that combining a small LLM with deterministic post-processing can outperform fine-tuning alone for structured-output tasks, making high-quality commit message generation feasible on consumer hardware.
Full story at: arXiv Software Engineering ↗