arXiv AI
Aug 19

Beyond FLOPs: Energy-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Sustainable LLMs on Code-Related Task

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.

By Enrique Barba Roque, Lu\'is Cruz, Annibale Panichella