arXiv:2512.08365v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The training and deployment of machine learning (ML) models have become extremely energy-intensive. While existing optimization efforts focus...
By Yi Pan, Wenbo Qian, Dedong Xie, Ruiyan Hu, Yigong Hu, Baris Kasikci
arXiv:2607. 04577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Code models strictly prioritize functional correctness, leaving software energy efficiency as an unoptimized byproduct.
By Saurabhsingh Rajput, Tushar Sharma
Code models strictly prioritize functional correctness, leaving software energy efficiency as an unoptimized byproduct. Training models to generate energy-efficient code requires reproducible feedback at scale, which physical hardware measurement cannot reliably provide due to variance.
arXiv:2610.02571v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As AI-assisted programming becomes increasingly mainstream, the environmental impact of AI-generated software has emerged as an important considerati...
By Ritika Rekhi, Bing Zhang, Md Arman Islam, Jaya Krishna Pasham, Yeswanth Chitturi, Akshay Paramesha, Isha Valiveti, Asif Imran, Bekir Turkkan, Tevfik Kosar
The paper explores energy-aware knowledge distillation for large language models (LLMs) used in software engineering tasks such as clone detection, vulnerability prediction, and code summarization. It shows that the commonly used FLOPs metric does not reliably reflect actual energy consumption, and that using energy-surrogate models during distillation can reduce inference energy by up to 90% and memory usage by 86% with only modest accuracy loss. The study demonstrates that guiding distillation with direct energy estimates improves the sustainability and deployability of LLMs on consumer hardware.
By Enrique Barba Roque, Lu\'is Cruz, Annibale Panichella
arXiv:2607. 20806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lightweight large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed locally on personal computers and are expected to play a growing role in resource-constrained edge and mobile environments.
By Tomohiro Harada, Enrique Alba, Gabriel Luque
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to optimize code for performance, but this study shows that such optimizations often increase energy consumption rather than reduce it. Across 11 open‑source models and 1,000 benchmark problems, inference energy ranged from 0.79 to 8.68 MJ, and 42 of 44 configurations produced code that used 4% to 886% more energy than human‑written reference solutions. Mixture‑of‑Experts architectures and token‑limit constraints can reduce inference energy, yet performance‑optimized code remains energy‑heavier, indicating that speed and sustainability are not always aligned goals.
By Sadra Emami, Benjamin Weigell, Mohammad Reza Mousavi, Gunel Jahangirova, Hugo Araujo, Bernhard Bauer
Software performance optimization is a notoriously complex and manual task. Despite the growing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code refinement, we still lack benchmarks that capture how optimization actually happens in real-world codebases.
SWE-Opt is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on repository‑level software performance optimization. It is built from 102 expert‑written optimizations from open‑source projects and measures runtime, peak memory, and Time‑Weighted Memory Usage (TWMU) under varied input data, execution conditions, and noise‑aware measurements. The study finds that current LLMs achieve few runtime gains and almost no memory improvements, whereas expert implementations deliver a 15.5× speedup and 171.3× memory reduction.
By Ezgi Sar{\i}kayak, Wenchao Gu, Hesham Ghonim, Chunyang Chen
Lightweight large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed locally on personal computers and are expected to play a growing role in resource-constrained edge and mobile environments. In such settings, energy consumption, execution time, and memory usage directly affect practical usability, yet existing evaluations of LLM efficiency largely rely on proxy descriptors such as parameter count or FLOPs, often decoupled from task precision.
The paper investigates how explicit reasoning in language models can lead to a "reasoning‑trace overflow," where the model spends most of its 32k‑token output budget on reasoning rather than producing code. Across seven models and six code benchmarks, overflow is rare on simple tasks but common on harder benchmarks, often due to repetitive reasoning loops. The study shows that disabling reasoning can sometimes be competitive, while prompt steering and budgeted transitions can mitigate overflow and improve token efficiency.
By Lukas Twist, Helen Yannakoudakis, Jie M. Zhang
arXiv:2610.14389v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Benchmark scores tell us what an LLM can do, but not how much energy is required to deliver that capability. We directly measure this trade-off for 86...
By Zeyu Yang, Wes Armour