Energy-Aware LLM Inference

LLM: Large Language Model

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25 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 19, 2026

Tandem: Serving Hybrid Linear-Attention GUI Agents on Mobile NPUs

Smartphone GUI agents complete tasks in mobile apps by repeatedly reading the screen and asking a model for the next action. Mobile neural processing units (NPUs) enable local execution, keeping screen contents on the phone, but model latency accumulates with every action. Hybrid linear attention models reduce memory requirements, yet reusing their recurrent state requires checkpoints at the appropriate input positions. Agent requests retain instructions but rewrite recent history, so checkpoint policies designed for chat continuation can miss reusable prefixes. Retaining rollback states for speculative decoding can also move prompt processing off the NPU's matrix unit, adding overhead that outweighs decoding savings on short action outputs. A loaded model can further hold the NPU awake between tasks. We present Tandem, a runtime for hybrid GUI agents on mobile NPUs. Tandem saves recurrent state where consecutive prompts diverge, allowing later requests to reuse previously processed context. It keeps most prefill on the matrix unit and produces rollback states through a short per-token tail. Its verification kernel reads each weight block once for all proposed tokens. Between request bursts, Tandem releases NPU power votes without unloading the model. We implement Tandem in llama.cpp and evaluate it on recorded agent interactions across two Snapdragon generations. On a Snapdragon 8 Elite, Tandem reduces per-step latency by 30% for text-based screen descriptions and 16% for screenshots relative to llama.cpp's fastest NPU configuration, reduces energy per text step by 33%, and lowers standby power with the model loaded from 0.76 to 0.22 W.

Zhuomin Chen, Jingchao Ni, Xu Zheng +4

Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA · University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA · Independent Researcher +2

On-Device Language Model Inference Mobile GUI Agents Energy-Aware LLM Inference Prefix Caching

Oct 18, 2026

ATEST: Adaptive Resource-Aware Test-Time Scaling for LLM Inference

Test-time scaling (TTS) improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by sampling multiple answers, but fixed sampling budgets ignore both query difficulty and the changing energy cost of inference under GPU contention. We measure up to a 4.1-fold increase in energy for the same four-sample query as GPU load rises. We present ATEST, a resource-aware TTS framework that jointly considers the expected value of additional samples and their current GPU cost. ATEST-Online, its default mode, requires no offline calibration: it incrementally generates samples, estimates the stability of the plurality answer, monitors live GPU conditions, and learns step energy cost online to decide when to stop. ATEST-Calibrated instead selects a per-query budget using offline accuracy and cost models, favoring deployments with stable loads. We evaluate both modes on four reasoning and question-answering datasets using Phi-3-mini on an NVIDIA A100 under controlled varying load, and test transfer to an NVIDIA L40S and Qwen2.5-3B. Across the four A100 datasets, ATEST-Online answers every query without exceeding the energy budget, while achieving the highest or statistically tied accuracy and reducing sampling as load increases. On GSM8K at high load, it achieves 60.0% accuracy with no deferrals, versus 44.0% accuracy and 42.4% deferrals for ATEST-Calibrated. Ablations show that online cost learning drives adaptation to load. Including offline profiling, ATEST-Online uses 42 times less GPU time and 48 times less energy than ATEST-Calibrated for the evaluated workload. Online control trades higher tail latency and lower throughput on short tasks for robustness under varying load; offline calibration remains competitive under stable conditions.

Mobina Kashaniyan, Ali Jannesari

Department of Computer Science Iowa State University, USA

Test-Time Scaling Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference Scheduling

Oct 14, 2026

Energy Consumption Analysis of Discrete Diffusion and Autoregressive Language Models

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to scale, their energy consumption during inference has become a critical concern. While Autoregressive (AR) models are the industry standard, Diffusion Language Models (DLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative capable of parallel token generation. In this paper, we perform a comparative energy benchmark of diffusion models (LLaDA-8B, Dream-7B) against AR counterparts (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B). We analyze the trade-offs between model architecture, KV-cache optimization, and Joules-per-token efficiency. Our results show that at longer sequences (200--600 tokens), diffusion models achieve 2.5--2.7 J/token, approximately 2

\times

more efficient than AR models with KV-cache (5.3--5.7 J/token). KV-cache provides substantial benefits for AR models at longer sequences (50--70% energy reduction).

Boris Ruf, Marcin Detyniecki

AXA, AI Research Paris, France

LLM Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference Efficient Language Model Inference Diffusion Language Model Inference

Oct 9, 2026

Measuring the Inference Energy Efficiency of Open-Weight LLMs across Benchmarks, Reasoning Modes, and Hardware

Benchmark scores tell us what an LLM can do, but not how much energy is required to deliver that capability. We directly measure this trade-off for 86 open-weight model checkpoints, evaluated on seven benchmarks and six hardware platforms ranging from a consumer GPU to an eight-GPU server. We find large differences in energy efficiency even among models with similar capability. Most configurations lie away from the score--energy Pareto frontier: they use a median of 2.6--4.8

\times

more energy than another configuration that scores at least as well, with differences reaching 27

\times

. Reasoning can improve capability, but enabling thinking increases energy by about 3.7

\times

on average, and the benefit depends strongly on the model family and output budget. Generated-token count is also an imperfect proxy for energy, misordering 18--24% of model pairs. In contrast, FP8 reduces energy by roughly a quarter with little change in score, while changing hardware largely rescales energy without changing the relative ranking of models. These results show that capability alone gives an incomplete picture of efficiency. We argue that benchmark scores should be reported together with measured energy consumption under a specified serving regime and output budget.

Zeyu Yang, Wes Armour

Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Efficient ML Open-Weight Language Models LLM Evaluation Efficient Language Model Reasoning

Sep 27, 2026

Greenpixie's AI Token Methodology: Assessing the Energy, Water and CO2-eq Impact of AI Tokens for Open and Closed Weight Models

We describe a methodology for estimating the per-token energy cost of cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) inference, separating between input (prefill) and output (decode) tokens. Graphics processing unit (GPU) energy usage is measured during inference benchmarking with open-weights models on a wide range of text-based tasks. The remaining server energy contribution from non-GPU hardware is estimated from the inference wall time. Bayesian linear regression is used to model the relationship between energy per token and LLM size, request traffic, and hardware deployment configuration. Proprietary frontier LLMs of unknown size and deployment are binned into size buckets based on naming conventions and performance priors, and the space of possible LLM configurations is sampled with Monte-Carlo methods to give a representative average energy per token and uncertainty. We also describe how these energy measurements can be used to estimate the carbon-dioxide equivalent (

\mathrm{CO_2\text{-}eq}

) emissions, both usage and embodied, and water consumed per token of AI inference. This methodology provides actionable data that enables reductions in cost, electricity usage,

\mathrm{CO_2\text{-}eq}

emitted and water consumed in cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Joshua Horswill, Ross Hunter, Matt Clifford +1

Greenpixie Ltd., London, UK.

LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Inference Responsible AI Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Sep 19, 2026

Measured Joules, Learned Routes: Learning to Route for Energy-Efficient LLM Serving

Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems are creating rapidly growing inference energy demands as model sizes grow and reasoning trajectories extend. While in practice, many queries do not require the capabilities of the largest available model, and routinely directing such queries to a high-capability model can introduce unnecessary, considerable computation and energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate whether adaptive routing across a heterogeneous pool of LLMs can reduce this energy burden without substantially compromising task performance. We design a language-model-based router that reads in each query and selects an answer model from a fixed candidate pool. The candidate models are first profiled through an offline tournament that records their correctness, latency, power, and GPU energy for each query. Using these measurements, the router is trained through supervised fine-tuning followed by group relative policy optimization (GRPO) with the tailored paradigms. Results demonstrate that learned routing can selectively allocate expensive model capacity based on query context and improve the accuracy-energy tradeoff in multi-LLM serving. Across seven benchmark tasks, we also observe a sharp accuracy-energy phase transition among routers, providing practical insights into improving energy efficiency while maintaining LLM performance.

Muhammad Abdur Rab Siddiqui, Daniela Rojas, Chen Yang +3

University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada · University of California San Diego La Jolla, California, USA · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China +1

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Routing LLM Serving Energy-Efficient ML

Sep 16, 2026

Where Should Agents Live? Energy-Memory Characterization of Agentic AI for the Edge-Cloud Continuum

As telecommunication networks evolve toward autonomous 5G-Advanced and 6G operations, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) workflows, where large language models (LLMs) execute multi-step reasoning, invoke diagnostic tools, retrieve domain knowledge, and coordinate across agent teams, are increasingly embedded across the edge-cloud continuum. While the biological brain accomplishes complex cognition on an exceptionally modest metabolic power budget of approximately 20W contemporary LLMs are profoundly energy- and memory-intensive, making sustainable lifecycle orchestration a critical operational priority. However, existing AI lifecycle metrics evaluate only isolated, single-model inferences or overlook multi-agent execution graphs entirely. Consequently, network operators lack foundational models to determine whether distributed agent communication incurs meaningful energy costs and where across edge-cloud tiers agent teams should physically reside. To address this gap, we introduce agentic-eCAL, generalizing the Energy Cost of AI Lifecycle (eCAL) metric to directed multi-agent workflows by coupling a closed-form two-rate single-call energy model (compute-bound prefill and memory-bound decode) with 7-layer OSI data transport. Grounded in hundreds of GPU benchmark configurations on NVIDIA A100 and H100, 16 open-weight models and 8 orchestration topologies, we validate components of the metric and study workflow placement implications. Our findings demonstrate that inter-agent text transport incurs 0.25% of workflow energy across 5G RAN, metro, and optical links. Therefore in edge-cloud agent placement the dominant energy cost of distribution is often not the transmission of inter-agent text itself, but the additional inference and context processing induced by that communication.

Carolina Fortuna, Vid Hanžel, Tim Strnad +1

Department of Communication Systems, Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova cesta 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Efficient ML LLM Agent Orchestration Energy-Aware LLM Inference Edge-Cloud Computing

Sep 3, 2026

Toward Sustainable Distributed LLM Inference: A Systems Synthesis and Research Agenda for an Energy-, Carbon-, and Cache-Aware llm-d Control Plane

Large language model (LLM) sustainability is increasingly a serving-systems problem, not only a training problem. In production, energy and carbon impact depend on more than model size: workload shape, batching, key-value (KV) cache reuse, prefill/decode placement, model and accelerator choice, power state, geographic carbon intensity, and service-level objectives (SLOs) all matter. Recent systems papers study many of these factors separately. This paper connects those results and asks a practical engineering question: what do they imply when the decision point is a distributed inference control plane such as llm-d? The contribution here is synthesis, not a new set of benchmark results. Reported performance, energy, carbon, and cost improvements remain the results of the cited papers and systems. I group the literature into recurring design patterns and use those patterns to sketch a Sustainable Inference Control Plane (SICP) for llm-d. The proposed control plane would consider latency, energy, carbon, cache reuse, serving cost, and quality when routing and scaling, while keeping TTFT/TPOT SLOs as hard constraints. I also outline an evaluation framework based on SLO-satisfied goodput per joule and per gram CO2e, together with a reproducible experimental plan. The main observation from connecting the literature is that sustainable LLM inference is unlikely to come from one "green" model or one accelerator; it is more naturally treated as a control problem across model, phase, cache, hardware, replica, region, and time.

Twinkll Sisodia

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference LLM Inference Serving LLM Inference Efficiency Carbon-Aware Computing LLM Inference Scheduling

Sep 1, 2026

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on mobile devices, making energy efficiency a key deployment constraint, yet the energy impact of prompt design remains underexplored. This paper aims to understand how two prompt properties, cognitive load and phrasing pattern, shape the energy behavior of on-device LLM inference. We conduct a broad empirical study covering prompt properties, datasets, models, and devices, with phase-level profiling that separates prefill and decode energy. We find that cognitive load primarily affects the energy cost per token, while phrasing pattern affects energy largely through token usage. Our energy-quality analysis further shows that prompt design reshapes the attainable frontier differently across models, highlighting the need for model-aware prompt design in energy-efficient on-device LLM inference. Code, datasets, and scripts are available at https://amai-gsu.github.io/PromptProperty/.

Wei Hu, Xiaolong Tu, Dawei Chen +3

Georgia State University · Toyota Motor North America

LLM Inference Efficiency On-Device Language Model Inference LLM Prompting Efficient Language Model Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Aug 28, 2026

Characterization of Request and Token Energy Costs for LLM Inference Workloads on GPU Platforms

Large language model (LLM) inference serving is priced by tokens, but GPU energy is consumed over inference windows. This accounting mismatch makes token-normalized metrics incomplete, since average output-token energy can decrease even when total request energy increases. We characterize this behavior with a decomposed energy model: a fixed one-time prefill with a fixed generation setup cost, while each output-token generation step adds marginal step energy. We evaluate this LLM inference energy model on NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPUs across dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, reporting both request energy and token energy as functions of model type (M), phase (P), batch size (B), context length (C), and output length (N). For Llama-3.2-1B on H200 at batch-16 and context-4K, increasing output length from 10 to 512 tokens reduces token energy from 7.46 to 0.72 J/token while total batched inference-window energy increases from 1.19 to 5.93 kJ. Batching also reduces token energy, but the gain is context-bounded: at 10 output tokens, the batch-16 to batch-1 gain falls from 6.31x at context-512 to 1.17x at context-4K. MoE models amplify this effect: sparse routing and fragmented expert execution increase fixed energy at low concurrency, while batching spreads that energy across more generated tokens and substantially narrows the dense-vs.-MoE token-energy gap. These results show that energy-aware serving should jointly optimize both request energy and token energy, rather than only reducing per-token energy cost.

Prabhu Vellaisamy, Vanessa Lam, Shawn Blanton +1

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Serving Efficient Language Model Inference

Aug 25, 2026

Understanding the Energy Scaling of Large Language Model Inference Across Context Lengths and Attention Architectures

The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) has raised increasing concerns about the energy consumption and environmental impact of inference. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of decode-phase energy consumption across representative open-source LLMs employing Multi-Head Attention (MHA), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and Grouped Query Attention with Sliding Window Attention (SWA) to characterize how attention architecture influences decode-phase energy consumption under varying inference workloads. We evaluate four models across different context lengths, batch sizes, and generation workloads while measuring GPU energy using NVIDIA hardware counters. We examine the effects of context length, attention mechanism, Key-Value (KV) cache growth, and batching on decode-phase energy consumption. Results show that attention mechanism is the primary factor governing how decode energy scales with context length. MHA models exhibit substantially steeper energy growth than GQA models, whereas GQA with SWA maintains nearly constant energy consumption. We further show that model size primarily determines absolute energy consumption, while batching reduces both energy per generated token and request latency by up to 87%. These findings provide practical guidance for selecting energy-efficient LLM architectures and inference configurations.

Molka Chkir, Syed Muhammad Danish, Jos Höll +1

Algoma University, Brampton, Canada · School of Informatics, Reutlingen University, Reutlingen

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference Efficiency Long-Context Language Model Inference Grouped-Query Attention Sliding-Window Attention

Aug 7, 2026

Multi-Level Modeling of Large Language Model Inference Latency and Energy via Hybrid Analytical--Machine-Learning Predictors

The rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly increased computational cost, energy consumption, and inference latency, making accurate estimation essential for sustainable artificial intelligence deployment and hardware-aware design. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Modeling for Energy and Latency of LLMs (HYMELL), a hybrid three-level framework for estimating LLM inference latency and energy by combining analytical modeling with machine learning (ML). HYMELL models LLM execution through a three-level hierarchy: analytical estimation of primitive operations, ML prediction of higher-level components, and an end-to-end model that captures system-level overheads across both prefill and decode phases. The framework supports diverse architectures, including dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) feed-forward networks (FFNs), as well as multi-head attention (MHA) and grouped-query attention (GQA) mechanisms. Evaluated on an NVIDIA H100 graphics processing unit (GPU), HYMELL achieves high predictive accuracy; notably, for LLaMA 3 8B, it attains less than 5% error for both prefill and decode phases. By predicting execution costs directly from architectural parameters, it enables fast, hardware-free design space exploration and energy-efficient optimization.

Saeid Shokoufa, Mohammad Erfan Sadeghi, Mehdi Kamal +1

University of Southern California Los Angeles, California, USA

LLM Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Jul 29, 2026

From Tokens to Watt-hours: Analytical Energy Estimation for LLM Inference on Modern GPUs

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. This report presents an analytically structured, empirically calibrated, GPU-level methodology for estimating LLM inference energy on NVIDIA H100-class accelerators without direct runtime measurement. The proposed estimator combines parameter-scaled transformer FLOP accounting, calibrated memory-traffic factors, and hardware-specific energy coefficients for FP16/BF16 tensor-core computation and high-bandwidth-memory movement. It explicitly separates prompt prefill from autoregressive decoding, enabling energy estimates for input tokens, output tokens, and complete inference requests. The methodology further decomposes total energy into compute, parameter-access, key-value-cache write, and attention-read components, allowing the scaling behavior with model size, context length, and generated-token count to be analyzed. The resulting estimates are not intended to replace physical power measurements; rather, they provide transparent, reproducible, and assumption-explicit approximations suitable for model comparison, green-coding analysis, and design-time evaluation of LLM inference workloads.

Tina Vartziotis, Rodopi Kosteli, Elli Vartziotis +5

1National Technical University of Athens, Patission Complex 42, 10682 Athens, Greece · 2Harvard University, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, 02138 Cambridge, MA, USA · 3TWT GmbH Science & Innovation, Industriestraße 6, 70565 Stuttgart, DE +4

LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Efficient ML LLM Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Jul 23, 2026

Profiling Lightweight Large Language Models

Lightweight large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed locally on personal computers and are expected to play a growing role in resource-constrained edge and mobile environments. In such settings, energy consumption, execution time, and memory usage directly affect practical usability, yet existing evaluations of LLM efficiency largely rely on proxy descriptors such as parameter count or FLOPs, often decoupled from task precision. This paper introduces a PTME-based experimental framework for the precision-aware profiling of lightweight LLM inference, jointly measuring Precision, execution Time, peak Memory usage, and Energy consumption through direct hardware-level measurements. The methodology is applied to a representative set of lightweight LLMs executed locally under edge-class resource envelopes on a controlled desktop platform, using benchmarks spanning code generation, mathematical reasoning, and multi-task understanding. We find that static proxy descriptors approximate inference cost well but fail to predict precision. Tightening the resource envelope increases cost without affecting precision, amplifying execution time more strongly than energy and penalizing larger models the most. Moreover, no single model dominates across all PTME dimensions, and a Pareto analysis reveals non-dominated configurations that would be hidden by accuracy-only or efficiency-only assessments, providing practical guidance for selecting models under different resource envelopes. These results show that selecting lightweight LLMs by size, FLOPs, latency, or accuracy alone can select the wrong deployment candidate; PTME profiling exposes configurations that preserve useful accuracy at lower physical cost.

Tomohiro Harada, Enrique Alba, Gabriel Luque

Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, Saitama, Japan

LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Evaluation On-Device Language Model Inference LLM Inference Small Language Models Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Jul 10, 2026

Attention to Detail: Evaluating Energy, Performance, and Accuracy Trade-offs Across vLLM Configurations

Large Language Models are reshaping how software is developed and maintained. They are typically deployed in production using inference engines such as vLLM, which can efficiently serve pre-trained, highly configurable models. While prior work has focused on model architectures and hardware acceleration, the impact of inference engine configuration on energy consumption, performance, and output quality remains poorly understood. In this paper, we present a large-scale controlled study of three selected vLLM configuration options: attention kernel type, prefix caching, and chunked prefill. We evaluate all combinations of these configurations across 5 open-weight LLMs and 5 diverse inference tasks, totaling

9,000

runs and

93,600

measures. We analyze energy consumption, latency, and accuracy, and examine both main effects and interaction effects between configuration options and tasks. Our results show that the studied configuration options significantly impact energy and performance, mainly driven by attention type and prefix caching, while chunked prefill has a limited effect under the default vLLM serving configuration and evaluated workloads. These effects are highly model- and workload-dependent, and no configuration is universally optimal. We further show that model choice dominates global trade-offs, while configuration tuning provides local improvements along the Pareto frontier. Unexpectedly, inference options can also affect model accuracy.

Nada Zine, Tristan Coignion, Vincenzo Stoico +3

Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria · Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, LaBRI · Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam +1

LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Evaluation LLM Serving LLM Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Jun 22, 2026

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck. Existing systems primarily optimize for decoding speed, implicitly assuming that faster execution is always preferable. We show instead that on-device LLM inference often has exploitable configuration slack: modestly lowering NPU and memory frequencies preserves quality of experience (QoE) while substantially improving energy efficiency and reducing heat. Realizing this opportunity in production is challenging. The most energy-efficient NPU/DDR setting varies with the model, inference engine, platform, and runtime conditions, with no stable ranking across configurations. Commercial devices further lack component-level power sensing, and shell temperature evolves with request arrivals, response lengths, and thermal history. To address these challenges, we propose EnerInfer, the first on-device LLM inference framework that jointly manages energy efficiency, throughput, and thermal comfort for LLM workloads. EnerInfer replaces per-model profiling and sensor-heavy control with disaggregated, model-structure-aware prediction and ranking-driven online feedback. It predicts throughput and power for unseen LLMs across NPU/DDR frequency settings, selects QoE-satisfying efficient configurations under runtime interference, and uses lightweight limited-horizon thermal prediction to dynamically switch between energy-optimized and thermally constrained inference. Evaluations on real-world LLMs show that EnerInfer improves energy efficiency by up to 65%, 12%, and 24% on phones, a laptop, and a development board, respectively, without QoE violation.

Bohua Zou, Nian Liu, Binqi Sun +6

Technical University of Munich · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Huawei Hilbert Research Center (Dresden) +1

On-Device Language Model Inference LLM Inference Acceleration Efficient Language Model Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference Power-Efficient Inference

May 21, 2026

ModeSwitch-LLM: A Lightweight Phase-Aware Controller for Cross-Mode LLM Inference on a Single GPU

ModeSwitch-LLM is a lightweight request-boundary controller for improving single-GPU large language model inference efficiency by routing each request to an appropriate fixed inference mode. Instead of relying on one static serving configuration, the system selects among FP16, quantized modes, speculative decoding, and hybrid modes such as GPTQ plus prefix caching and INT8 plus continuous batching using cheap workload-level features. We evaluate ModeSwitch-LLM on Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct served on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. On deployment-style synthetic workloads, the online controller achieves a 2.10x mean latency speedup over FP16 and a 0.48x mean energy ratio, corresponding to 51.7% lower energy per token. On automatic benchmarks used as a quality gate, accuracy remains close to FP16 with a mean delta of +0.17 percentage points. We also evaluate lightweight learned routers, but find that they do not clearly outperform the rule-based controller because they add routing overhead and more often select modes that violate quality, energy, or memory constraints. These results show that simple request-aware routing can recover substantial efficiency from existing inference modes without retraining the model or changing its architecture.

Aman Sunesh, Ali Alshehhi, Hivansh Dhakne

Department of Computer Engineering NYU Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences New York University New York, United States · Department of Computer Engineering New York University New York, United States

LLM Inference LLM Serving GPU Acceleration LLM Inference Efficiency LLM Inference Scheduling LLM Routing+1

May 14, 2026

EnergyLens: Predictive Energy-Aware Exploration for Multi-GPU LLM Inference Optimization

We present EnergyLens, an end-to-end framework for energy-aware large language model (LLM) inference optimization. As LLMs scale, predicting and reducing their energy footprint has become critical for sustainability and datacenter operations, yet existing approaches either require production-level code and expensive profiling or fail to accurately capture multi-GPU energy behavior. As a result, practitioners lack tools for deciding which optimizations to prioritize and for selecting among existing deployment configurations when exhaustive profiling is impractical. EnergyLens addresses this gap with an intuitive einsum-based interface that captures LLM specifications including fusion, parallelism, and compute-communication overlap, combined with load-imbalance-aware MoE modeling and an empirically driven communication energy model for multi-GPU settings. We validate EnergyLens on Llama3 and Qwen3-MoE across tensor-parallel and expert-parallel configurations, achieving mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between 9.25% and 13.19% for multi-GPU prefill and decode energy, and 12.97% across SM allocations for Megatron-style overlap. Our energy-driven exploration reveals up to 1.47x and 52.9x energy variation across configurations in prefill and decode efficiency and motivates distributed serving. We further show that compute-communication overlap is difficult to optimize with intuition alone, but EnergyLens correctly identifies Pareto-optimal overlap configurations.

Zhiye Song, Kyungmi Lee, Eun Kyung Lee +3

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139 · IBM Research Yorktown Heights, NY 10598

LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Efficient ML GPU Acceleration LLM Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference

May 13, 2026

MARLIN: Multi-Agent Game-Theoretic Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable LLM Inference in Cloud Datacenters

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in cloud-based platforms, propelled by the introduction of AI-based consumer and enterprise services. LLM inference requests in particular account for up to 90% of total LLM lifecycle energy use, dwarfing training energy costs. The rising volume of LLM inference requests is increasing environmental footprints, particularly carbon emissions and water consumption. To improve sustainability for LLM inference serving in cloud datacenter environments, we propose a novel multi-agent game-theoretic reinforcement learning framework called MARLIN to co-optimize time-to-first token (TTFT), carbon emissions, water usage, and energy costs associated with LLM inference. MARLIN demonstrates a reduction of at least 18% in TTFT, 33% in carbon emissions, 43% in water usage, and 11% in energy costs compared to state-of-the-art LLM inference management frameworks.

H. Moore, S. Qi, D. Milojicic +2

Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO, USA · Hewlett Packard Labs Milpitas, CA, USA

LLM Serving LLM Inference Game Theory Energy-Aware LLM Inference Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

May 11, 2026

EnergyLens: Interpretable Closed-Form Energy Models for Multimodal LLM Inference Serving

As large language models span dense, mixture-of-experts, and state-space architectures and are deployed on heterogeneous accelerators under increasingly diverse multimodal workloads, optimising inference energy has become as critical as optimizing latency and throughput. Existing approaches either treat latency as an energy proxy or rely on data-hungry black-box surrogates. Both fail under varying parallelism strategies: latency and energy optima diverge in over 20% of configurations we tested, and black-box surrogates require hundreds of profiling samples to generalize across model families and hardware. We present EnergyLens, which uses symbolic regression as a structure-discovery tool over profiling data to derive a single twelve-parameter closed-form energy model expressed in terms of system properties such as degree of parallelism, batch size, and sequence length. Unlike black-box surrogates, EnergyLens decouples tensor and pipeline parallelism contributions and separates prefill from decode energy, making its predictions physically interpretable and actionable. Fitted from as few as 50 profiling measurements, EnergyLens achieves 88.2% Top-1 configuration selection accuracy across many evaluation scenarios compared to 60.9% for the closest prior analytical baseline, matches the predictive accuracy of ensemble ML methods with 10x fewer profiling samples, and extrapolates reliably to unseen batch sizes and hardware platforms without structural modification, making it a practical, interpretable tool for energy-optimal LLM deployment.

Vittorio Palladino, Gianluca Palermo, Michael E. Papka +1

Politecnico di Milano & UIC · Politecnico di Milano · University of Illinois Chicago

Efficient Multimodal Inference LLM Inference Efficient Language Model Inference Energy-Aware LLM Inference

Apr 29, 2026

LLM-Guided Runtime Parameter Optimization for Energy-Efficient Model Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an integral part of many real-world workflows. However, LLMs consume a lot of energy, which becomes a large concern in the scale of the demand for these tools. As LLMs become integrated into different workflows, different applications have arisen to deal with the challenge of running inference for these tools. This raises another issue of choosing the runtime parameter values for these services in order to minimize the energy consumption. Oftentimes this requires deep knowledge of the application or traditional optimization methods that can take days to find optimal values. In this work, we created a human-in-the-loop flow with LLM-assisted runtime parameter optimization in order to solve this issue. With human-created, specific feedback prompting methods, chat-based LLMs can iteratively find energy-efficient inference parameters faster than traditional search methods. LLMs can also tailor their solutions to different hardware setups and easily take into account other system constraints. The enhanced prompt template was able to converge below the threshold at an average of 3.4 prompts compared to the baseline, which converged in an average of 5.2 prompts, and consistently achieved lower final energy per token. The enhanced prompt template also outperformed Sobol sampling in convergence speed.

Katelyn Crumpacker, Dimitrios Nikolopoulos

Virginia Polytechnic and State University

LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Efficient ML Inference-Time Optimization Large Language Model-Guided Optimization Energy-Aware LLM Inference Power-Efficient Inference

Apr 10, 2026

Watt Counts: Energy-Aware Benchmark for Sustainable LLM Inference on Heterogeneous GPU Architectures

While the large energy consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is recognized by the community, system operators lack guidance for energy-efficient LLM inference deployments that leverage energy trade-offs of heterogeneous hardware due to a lack of energy-aware benchmarks and data. In this work we address this gap with Watt Counts: the largest open-access dataset of energy consumption of LLMs, with over 5,000 experiments for 50 LLMs across 10 NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in batch and server scenarios along with a reproducible, open-source benchmark that enables community submissions to expand this dataset. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a system-level study of LLM inference across heterogeneous GPU architectures and show that GPU selection is crucial for energy efficiency outcomes and that optimal hardware choices vary significantly across models and deployment scenarios, demonstrating the critical importance of hardware-aware deployment in heterogeneous LLM systems. Guided by our data and insights, we show that practitioners can reduce energy consumption by up to 70% in server scenarios with negligible impact on user experience, and by up to 20% in batch scenarios.

Mauricio Fadel Argerich, Jonathan Fürst, Marta Patiño-Martínez

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, C. de los Ciruelos, Boadilla del Monte, 28660, Madrid, Spain · Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland, Gertrudstrasse 15, Winterthur, 8400, Zurich, Switzerland

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Efficient ML Heterogeneous Computing LLM Evaluation

Mar 16, 2026

This Is Taking Too Long -- Investigating Time as a Proxy for Energy Consumption of LLMs

The energy consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is raising growing concerns due to their adverse effects on environmental stability and resource use. Yet, these energy costs remain largely opaque to users, especially when models are accessed through an API -- a black box in which all information depends on what providers choose to disclose. In this work, we investigate inference time measurements as a proxy to approximate the associated energy costs of API-based LLMs. We ground our approach by comparing our estimations with actual energy measurements from locally hosted equivalents. Our results show that time measurements allow us to infer GPU models for API-based LLMs, grounding our energy cost estimations. Our work aims to create means for understanding the associated energy costs of API-based LLMs, especially for end users.

Lars Krupp, Daniel Geißler, Francisco M. Calatrava-Nicolas +3

Embedded Intelligence DFKI and RPTU Kaiserslautern, Germany · Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) Örebro University Örebro, Sweden

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference Energy-Efficient ML

Mar 6, 2026

The Compression Paradox in LLM Inference: Provider-Dependent Energy Effects of Prompt Compression

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models has created an environmental paradox: the very technology that could help solve climate challenges is itself becoming a significant contributor to global carbon emissions. We test whether prompt compression improves inference energy efficiency in 28,421 successful API trials (28,428 planned) across three providers (OpenAI GPT-4o-mini, Anthropic Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and DeepSeek-Chat), five benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, GSM8K, MATH, MMLU), and four compression ratios (r in {1.0, 0.7, 0.5, 0.3}). Energy is estimated with a token-based proxy calibrated against local direct measurements, and quality is tracked with benchmark pass rates. Compression produced substantial quality loss (overall pass rate 26.0% at baseline vs. 1.5% at r=0.7) and strongly provider-dependent energy behavior. DeepSeek exhibited output expansion under compression (21 to 798 tokens at r=0.3), corresponding to energy increases up to +2,140%, while GPT-4o-mini showed mixed effects including a reduction at r=0.5. These results indicate that input-token reduction alone is not a reliable energy optimization strategy in production inference. For the evaluated settings, model selection and output-length control provided more consistent energy-quality tradeoffs than prompt compression.

Warren Johnson

Plexor Labs Principal Researcher

LLM Inference Efficiency Energy-Aware LLM Inference Efficient Language Model Inference Prompt Compression

Mar 4, 2026

Beyond Test-Time Compute Strategies: Advocating Energy-per-Token in LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across diverse tasks but come with substantial energy and computational costs, particularly in request-heavy scenarios. In many real-world applications, the full scale and capabilities of LLMs are often unnecessary, as Small Language Models (SLMs) can provide accurate responses for simpler text generation tasks. When enhanced with advanced reasoning strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting or Majority Voting, SLMs can approach the performance of larger models while reducing overall computational requirements. However, these strategies can also introduce additional energy costs, creating an energy-accuracy trade-off. Our analysis examines these trade-offs in test-time compute strategies for smaller models compared to larger ones, using the MMLU benchmark. Additionally, we explore the input-output token dynamics of transformer architectures, which result in nonlinear hardware energy operation curves for LLMs. To bridge AI research with its physical impact, we propose energy efficiency metrics, including Energy-per-Token, as complements to traditional accuracy benchmarks. Beyond model selection, we propose controlled reasoning in CoT token generation, using operating curves to regulate reasoning depth dynamically. This vision integrates a energy-aware routing mechanism, ensuring that model selection and inference strategies balance accuracy for sustainable AI deployment.

Patrick Wilhelm, Thorsten Wittkopp, Odej Kao

BIFOLD, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Energy-Aware LLM Inference LLM Inference Efficiency Efficient Language Model Reasoning Small Language Models CoT Reasoning