arXiv:2607. 09520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are the perceptual backbone of embodied AI, but their energy footprint on edge hardware remains poorly understood.
By Junfei Zhan, Haoxun Shen, Mingang Guo, Zixuan Huang, Tengjiao He
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
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:2608.28667v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their environmental impact during inference. While Green AI researc...
By Rajeswari Kannan, Raj Firke, Shreya Bengle, Srushti Deshmukh
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.
By Guanyu Cai, Ruiming Tian, Lang Yang, Zhouhong Ren, Jinliang Yuan, Lingkun Li, Jiliang Wang
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
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.
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:2608.28044v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference serving is priced by tokens, but GPU energy is consumed over inference windows. This accounting mismatch makes t...
By Prabhu Vellaisamy, Vanessa Lam, Shawn Blanton, John Paul Shen
arXiv:2609.33965v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We describe a methodology for estimating the per-token energy cost of cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) inference, separating between i...
By Joshua Horswill, Ross Hunter, Matt Clifford, James Hall
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
arXiv:2601. 06649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Research in machine learning has questioned whether increases in training token counts reliably produce proportional performance gains in large language models.
By Joe Dwyer