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.
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...
arXiv:2607. 09172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are reshaping how software is developed and maintained.
arXiv:2608. 08744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The carbon footprint of any deployed Large Language Model (LLM) accumulates during inference, where repeated use of the model substantially exceeds the one-time cost of fine-tuning.
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.
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:2606. 04023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have been extensively evaluated on code generation tasks for general-purpose programming and GPU-accelerated environments (e.
arXiv:2610.17531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While it is known that quantization of large language models (LLMs) reduces memory usage via lower-bit weights, studies quantifying the resulting imp...
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.
arXiv:2607. 04577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Code models strictly prioritize functional correctness, leaving software energy efficiency as an unoptimized byproduct.
The paper reports a reproducible GPU power benchmark for 18 open‑source LLMs (0.5B–7B parameters) run on a single consumer RTX 4060ti GPU using the Ollama inference engine. Energy metrics such as mean/peak power, total energy per prompt, energy per output token, and throughput were measured, revealing that model architecture and quantization strategy, rather than parameter count alone, drive energy efficiency. The most efficient models were qwen2.5:0.5b and tinyllama:1.1b, while the 7B‑Mistral model consumed up to 8.6× more energy per token, and qwen3.5:0.8b(on) showed unusually high per‑prompt energy due to extended internal reasoning.
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.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and low-bit quantization are now standard tools for adapting language models under tight compute budgets, yet their interaction is most often studied on billion-parameter models where the design space is expensive to explore. We ask a complementary question: on a specific, fully reproducible 60M-parameter encoder-decoder model (T5-small) and a single-table text-to-SQL benchmark (WikiSQL), how much task accuracy does each efficiency knob actually cost?