arXiv AI

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Tokens: How Vision Language Models Cut AI Energy Costs While Improving Accuracy

arXiv:2608. 07427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM inference accounts for over 90% of AI operational energy, scaling directly with input token count---a critical inefficiency for telecom network analytics and numerical time-series data analysis (NTSDA), where raw multivariate KPI windows from 4G/5G cell sites expand into thousands of floating-point tokens.

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 AI
6d ago

Energy Efficiency of Locally Deployed LLMs: A Preliminary Quantitative GPU Power Benchmark on Consumer Hardware

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.

By Philipp M. Z\"ahl, Elja Dalipaj, Anika Hennig, Timon Bayer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

From Tokens to Watt-hours: Analytical Energy Estimation for LLM Inference on Modern GPUs

arXiv:2607. 26571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The operational energy consumption of large language model (LLM) inference is becoming an increasingly important component of the environmental footprint of deployed AI systems.

By Tina Vartziotis, Rodopi Kosteli, Elli Vartziotis, George Dasoulas, Michael Keckeisen, Konstantinos Skianis, Sotirios Kotsopoulos, Francesca Dominici
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

From Tokens to Watt-hours: Analytical Energy Estimation for LLM Inference on Modern GPUs

The operational energy consumption of large language model (LLM) inference is becoming an increasingly important component of the environmental footprint of deployed AI systems. However, direct measurement of inference energy often requires hardware telemetry, power instrumentation, or infrastructure-specific monitoring, limiting its applicability in comparative studies, early-stage system design, and sustainability reporting.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

What Transfers from Text to Vision? Capability Scaling Laws and Transfer Dynamics for VLMs

The paper introduces the Capability-Driven Multimodal Scaling Law, a cross-family framework that predicts vision-language model (VLM) benchmark accuracy from a low-dimensional textual capability score extracted via PCA. By training over 150 VLMs on 34 large language models across seven families, the authors demonstrate that the law accurately extrapolates transfer rates from 8B to 72B‑parameter backbones, predicts full training trajectories, and generalizes to unseen model families. The study also reveals actionable insights, such as certain textual benchmarks negatively correlating with multimodal performance and base LLMs outperforming instruction-tuned counterparts as VLM backbones due to higher absorption rates.

By Ziran Li, Qiang Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Shanglin Lei, Borun Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Understanding the Energy Scaling of Large Language Model Inference Across Context Lengths and Attention Architectures

The paper systematically studies decode‑phase energy consumption of open‑source large language models using different attention architectures—Multi‑Head Attention (MHA), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and GQA with Sliding Window Attention (SWA). It evaluates four models across varying context lengths, batch sizes, and generation workloads, measuring GPU energy via NVIDIA counters. Findings show that the attention mechanism is the main driver of how energy scales with context length, with MHA models growing steeply, GQA models growing less, and GQA+SWA remaining nearly constant; model size mainly sets absolute energy use, while batching can cut energy per token and latency by up to 87%.

By Molka Chkir, Syed Muhammad Danish, Jos H\"oll, Arghavan Asad