arXiv AI
Oct 26

Green Code or Costly Code? Evaluating the Energy Costs of Iterative LLM-Based Code Optimizations

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

MetaRSI / RSI2: A Meta-Recursive Self-Improving System for Recursive Self-Improving Systems Themselves

arXiv:2609.06396v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI) lets a system improve the model-building machinery from its own failures, so every later model inherits the gain. Yet...

By Zihan Tan, Leixin Sun, Zitong Shi, Yitao Liu, Jiajun Wu, Nathaniel Brooks, Jiaru Qian, Xiaoran Shang, Suyuan Huang, Yi Ding, Yangxu Liao, Mukai Li, Qiushi Sun, Shudong Liu, Xuankun Rong, Xiaohang Yu, Zhuo Chen, Hejia Geng, Chenxin Li, Aozhou Wang, Zengji Tu, Robert Tang, Yuxin Zhan, Eric Jiang, Yuxin Wu, Jianqing Zhang, Xiao Liang, Fang Wu, Haochi Zhang, Alexander Marlow, Guancheng Wan