cs.AIOct 24, 2025

A Vision Toward Energy-Efficient Domain-Specific Artificial Intelligence Models and Agents

Authors: Abhijit Chatterjee, Niraj K. Jha, Jonathan D. Cohen, Thomas L. Griffiths, Hongjing Lu, Diana Marculescu, Ashiqur Rasul, Wenrui Xu, +1 more

Abstract

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has taken a tight hold on broad aspects of society, industry, business, and governance in ways that dictate the prosperity and might of the world's economies. The AI market size is projected to grow from {$}189 billion in 2023 to {$}4.8 trillion by 2033. Currently, AI is dominated by large language models (LLMs) that exhibit linguistic and visual intelligence. However, training these models requires a massive amount of data scraped from the web as well as large amounts of energy (50-60 GWh to train GPT-4). Despite these costs, these models often hallucinate, a characteristic that prevents them from being deployed in critical application domains. In contrast, the human brain consumes only 20W of power. What is needed is the next level of AI evolution in which lightweight domain-specific multimodal models, especially compact models with 10--20B parameters for bounded domains, with higher levels of intelligence can reason, plan, and make decisions in dynamic environments with real-time data and prior knowledge, while learning continuously and evolving in ways that enhance future decision-making capability. This will define the next wave of AI, progressing from today's large models, trained with vast amounts of data, to nimble energy-efficient domain-specific agents that can reason and think in a world full of uncertainty. To support such agents, hardware will need to be reimagined to allow system-level energy efficiencies ≥1000X\geq {1000X} over the state of the art for targeted domain tasks, subject to accuracy, latency, and coverage constraints. Such a vision of future AI systems is developed in this work.

Explore similar work

CardsList
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

A Survey on the Green Development of Large Models: From Resource-Efficient Architectures to Hardware-Software Co-Design

The rapid expansion of large-scale AI models has led to significant performance breakthroughs across diverse domains, yet it has also raised critical concerns regarding computational costs, energy consumption, and environmental sustainability. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the green development of large models, emphasizing resource-efficient architectures and full-stack hardware-software co-design. We systematically review recent advances in efficient model construction, including attention operator optimization, linear-complexity architectures, and model sparsification and merging, as well as training and deployment strategies such as data-efficient learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and computational compression. Beyond algorithmic improvements, we explore energy-efficient AI hardware, including mainstream AI chips, memory optimization, cross-platform deployment, and sustainable infrastructure. Furthermore, we examine how large models are being applied to sustainability-critical domains such as DeepSeek, remote sensing interpretation, national-scale infrastructure, and global initiatives. Finally, we discuss key challenges and future directions, highlighting the need for continual learning paradigms, memory-centric hardware, and standardized evaluation protocols. This survey aims to offer a holistic roadmap toward sustainable, scalable, and socially responsible development of large models. Paper homepage: https://cje.ejournal.org.cn/article/doi/10.23919/cje.2025.00.438
Linhui Xiao, Guiping Cao, Mingyue Guo +6
Artificial Intelligence InfrastructureArtificial Intelligence ModelsSustainabilityCo-DesignSurvey
AskPDF
May 25, 2026cs.AI

AI-Model Network: Concept, Current State and Future

While the primary function of computers lies in computation and processing, the core value of the Internet is rooted in sharing and collaboration. Computers create the Internet, and the Internet empowers the value of computers. The rapid development of the Internet, cloud computing, and big data is pushing artificial intelligence into the era of large models (LMs). However, the practical application of LMs is currently hindered by high training costs and deployment complexities, driving a shift toward lightweight, private, and domain-specific models. With the rapid proliferation and wide distribution of heterogeneous models, enabling effective interaction and collaboration among them has emerged as a critical bottleneck that urgently needs to be addressed in LM development. Drawing inspiration from the development of the Internet, this paper proposes the concept, vision, and system architecture of world wide AI-model network (AI-ModelNet). It is a novel paradigm that achieves interconnection, capability sharing, and collaborative reasoning by establishing pathways between models. We first briefly review the current state of single-model and multi-model research. Subsequently, the systemic vision and hierarchical architecture of AI-ModelNet are articulated, followed by validation of the framework's feasibility through a prototype system and diverse application cases. Finally, key directions for future research are discussed preliminarily.
Li Zhetao, Zeng Xiyu, Wang Jianhui +6
Artificial Intelligence ModelsLlm-Synthesized Code World ModelsCloudMulti-Model Study
AskPDF
May 1, 2026cs.LG

AgentStop: Terminating Local AI Agents Early to Save Energy in Consumer Devices

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate complex, multi-step tasks such as coding or web-based question answering. While remote, cloud-based agents offer scalability and ease of deployment, they raise privacy concerns, depend on network connectivity, and incur recurring API costs. Deploying agents locally on user devices mitigates these issues by preserving data privacy and eliminating usage-based fees. However, agentic workflows are far more resource-intensive than typical LLM interactions. Iterative reasoning, tool use, and failure retries substantially increase token consumption, often expending significant compute without successfully completing tasks. In this work, we investigate the time, token, and energy overhead of locally deployed LLM-based agents on consumer hardware. Our measurements show that agentic execution increases GPU power draw, temperature, and battery drain compared to single-inference workloads. To address this inefficiency, we introduce AgentStop, a lightweight efficiency supervisor that predicts and preemptively terminates trajectories unlikely to succeed. Leveraging low-cost execution signals, such as token-level log probabilities, AgentStop can reduce wasted energy by 15-20% with minimal impact on task performance (<5% utility drop) for challenging web-based question answering and coding benchmarks. These findings position predictive early termination as a practical mechanism for enabling sustainable, privacy-preserving LLM agents on user devices. Our project code and data are available at https://github.com/brave-experiments/AgentStop.
Dzung Pham, Kleomenis Katevas, Ali Shahin Shamsabadi +1
Artificial Intelligence InfrastructureArtificial Intelligence AgentsSingle-Inference Workloads
AskPDF