arXiv AI

Is Your NPU Ready for LLMs? Dissecting the Hidden Efficiency Bottlenecks in Mobile LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 05475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on mobile devices enhances privacy and reduces latency, but is severely bottlenecked by hardware inefficiency.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck.

By Bohua Zou, Nian Liu, Binqi Sun, Matteo Mascherin, Debayan Roy, Yutao Liu, Yu Peng, Ning Jia, Haibo Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Profiling Lightweight Large Language Models

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

Profiling Lightweight Large Language Models

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

The Battery Price of edge AI: A study of the Environmental Impact of LLM Inference on Mobile Devices

The paper investigates the environmental impact of running large language models (LLMs) on mobile devices. It evaluates 18 different LLM configurations on two smartphones and a server, measuring energy per token, latency, accuracy, and battery-cycle consumption. Findings reveal that on-device inference is about three times less energy‑efficient than batched server inference, that energy consumption varies non‑monotonically with quantization bit‑width, and that most models are not on the Pareto front of accuracy and energy efficiency. The study concludes that local AI is not inherently more sustainable than cloud inference, with the majority of environmental impact stemming from device embodied carbon.

By \'Edouard Gu\'egain, Tristan Coignion
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

LeanStream: A Speculate-and-Refine Streaming Framework for Efficient on-Device LLM Inference

LeanStream introduces a speculate‑and‑refine streaming framework that enables efficient on‑device inference of large language models by progressively refining computation, loading, and cache‑retention priorities using partial GPU results. This approach allows fine‑grained overlap between GPU execution and storage I/O, avoiding the trade‑offs of existing systems that serialize execution or incur redundant weight fetches. Implemented on mobile and embedded platforms, LeanStream reduces memory usage by 4.8× to 7.5× compared to prior work while improving token generation throughput by 1.6× to 2.1×.

By Renyuan Liu (Richard), Yuyang Leng (Richard), Kaiyan Liu (Richard), Yuzhou Zhong (Richard), Shaohan Hu (Richard), Chun-Fu (Richard), Chen, Peijun Zhao, Heechul Yun, Shuochao Yao