arXiv Computation and Language By Wei Hu, Xiaolong Tu, Dawei Chen, Yitao Chen, Kyungtae Han, Haoxin Wang

How Do Prompt Variations Affect Energy Consumption in On-Device LLMs?

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The paper investigates how prompt design influences energy consumption in on-device large language models (LLMs). It examines two prompt properties—cognitive load and phrasing pattern—across various datasets, models, and devices, using phase-level profiling to separate prefill and decode energy. Findings show that cognitive load mainly affects energy per token, while phrasing pattern influences energy mainly through token usage, and that prompt design reshapes the energy-quality trade‑off differently for each model.

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