Energy-Efficient ML

Large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) networks enable intelligent services such as smart cities and autonomous driving, but often face resource constraints. Collecting heterogeneous sensory data, especially in small-scale datasets, is challenging, and independent edge nodes can lead to inefficient resource utilization and reduced learning performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a collaborative optimization framework for energy-efficient federated edge learning with small-scale datasets. We first derive an expected learning loss to quantify the relationship between the number of training samples and learning objectives. A stochastic online learning algorithm is then designed to adapt to data variations, and a resource optimization problem with a convergence bound is formulated. Finally, an online distributed algorithm efficiently solves large-scale optimization problems with high scalability. Extensive simulations and autonomous navigation case studies with collision avoidance demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves learning performance and resource efficiency compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Large language models are transforming all areas of academia and industry, attracting the attention of researchers, professionals, and the general public. In the trek for more powerful architectures, Mixture-of-Experts, inspired by ensemble models, have emerged as one of the most effective ways to follow. However, this implies a high computational burden for both training and inference. To reduce the impact on computing and memory footprint as well as the energy consumption, simplification methods has arisen as very effective procedures. In this paper, an original algorithm, MoEITS, for MoE-LLMs simplification is presented. The algorithm is characterized by a refined simplicity, underpinned by standardized Information Theoretic frameworks. MoEITS is analyzed in depth from theoretical and practical points of view. Its computational complexity is studied. Its performance on the accuracy of the simplified LLMs and the reduction rate achieved is assessed through a thoroughly designed experimentation. This empirical evaluation includes a comparison with state-of-the-art MoE-LLM pruning methods applied on Mixtral $8\times7$B, Qwen1.5-2.7B, and DeepSeek-V2-Lite. The extensive experimentation conducted demonstrates that MoEITS outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by generating models that are both effective across all benchmarks and computationally efficient. The code implementing the method will be available at https://github.com/luisbalru/MoEITS.

Photoplethysmography (PPG)-based blood pressure (BP) estimation is a challenging task, particularly on resource-constrained wearable devices. However, fully on-board processing is desirable to ensure user data confidentiality. Recent deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved high BP estimation accuracy by reconstructing BP waveforms or directly regressing BP values, but their large memory, computation, and energy requirements hinder deployment on wearables. This work introduces a fully automated DNN design pipeline that combines hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS), pruning, and mixed-precision search (MPS) to generate accurate yet compact BP prediction models optimized for ultra-low-power multicore systems-on-chip (SoCs). Starting from state-of-the-art baseline models on four public datasets, our optimized networks achieve up to 7.99% lower error with a 7.5x parameter reduction, or up to 83x fewer parameters with negligible accuracy loss. All models fit within 512 kB of memory on our target SoC (GreenWaves' GAP8), requiring less than 55 kB and achieving an average inference latency of 142 ms and energy consumption of 7.25 mJ. Patient-specific fine-tuning further improves accuracy by up to 64%, enabling fully autonomous, low-cost BP monitoring on wearables.

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.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer superior energy efficiency over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, they encounter significant deficiencies in training and inference metrics when applied to Spiking Vision Transformers (S-ViTs). Existing paradigms including ANN-SNN Conversion and Spatial-Temporal Backpropagation (STBP) suffer from inherent limitations, precluding concurrent optimization of memory, accuracy and energy consumption. To address these issues, we propose Ge$^\text{2}$mS-T, a novel architecture implementing grouped computation across temporal, spatial and network structure dimensions. Specifically, we introduce the Grouped-Exponential-Coding-based IF (ExpG-IF) model, enabling lossless conversion with constant training overhead and precise regulation for spike patterns. Additionally, we develop Group-wise Spiking Self-Attention (GW-SSA) to reduce computational complexity via multi-scale token grouping and multiplication-free operations within a hybrid attention-convolution framework. Experiments confirm that our method can achieve superior performance with ultra-high energy efficiency on challenging benchmarks. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to systematically establish multi-dimensional grouped computation for resolving the triad of memory overhead, learning capability and energy budget in S-ViTs. Code is available at https://github.com/hzc1208/Ge2mST.

Time series classification (TSC) enables important use cases, however lacks a unified understanding of performance trade-offs across models, datasets, and hardware. While resource awareness has grown in the field, TSC methods have not yet been rigorously evaluated for energy efficiency. This paper introduces a holistic evaluation framework that explicitly explores the balance of predictive performance and resource consumption in TSC. To boost efficiency, we apply a theoretically bounded pruning strategy to leading hybrid classifiers - Hydra and Quant - and present Hydrant, a novel, prunable combination of both. With over 4000 experimental configurations across 20 MONSTER datasets, 13 methods, and three compute setups, we systematically analyze how model design, hyperparameters, and hardware choices affect practical TSC performance. Our results showcase that pruning can significantly reduce energy consumption by up to 80% while maintaining competitive predictive quality, usually costing the model less than 5% of accuracy. The proposed methodology, experimental results, and accompanying software advance TSC toward sustainable and reproducible practice.

Ensemble methods are frequently used in recommender systems to improve accuracy by combining multiple models. Recent work reports sizable performance gains, but most studies still optimize primarily for accuracy and robustness rather than for energy efficiency. This paper measures accuracy energy trade offs of ensemble techniques relative to strong single models. We run 93 controlled experiments in two pipelines: 1. explicit rating prediction with Surprise (RMSE) and 2. implicit feedback ranking with LensKit (NDCG@10). We evaluate four datasets ranging from 100,000 to 7.8 million interactions (MovieLens 100K, MovieLens 1M, ModCloth, Anime). We compare four ensemble strategies (Average, Weighted, Stacking or Rank Fusion, Top Performers) against baselines and optimized single models. Whole system energy is measured with EMERS using a smart plug and converted to CO2 equivalents. Across settings, ensembles improve accuracy by 0.3% to 5.7% while increasing energy by 19% to 2,549%. On MovieLens 1M, a Top Performers ensemble improves RMSE by 0.96% at an 18.8% energy overhead over SVD++. On MovieLens 100K, an averaging ensemble improves NDCG@10 by 5.7% with 103% additional energy. On Anime, a Surprise Top Performers ensemble improves RMSE by 1.2% but consumes 2,005% more energy (0.21 vs. 0.01 Wh), increasing emissions from 2.6 to 53.8 mg CO2 equivalents, and LensKit ensembles fail due to memory limits. Overall, selective ensembles are more energy efficient than exhaustive averaging,

The rapid emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed Agentic artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems integrating perception, reasoning, and action into closed-loop pipelines for continuous adaptation. While unlocking transformative applications in mobile edge computing, autonomous systems, and next-generation wireless networks, this paradigm creates fundamental energy challenges through iterative inference and persistent data exchange. Unlike traditional AI where bottlenecks are computational Floating Point Operations (FLOPs), Agentic AI faces compounding computational and communication energy costs. In this survey, we propose an energy accounting framework identifying computational and communication costs across the Perception-Reasoning-Action cycle. We establish a unified taxonomy spanning model simplification, computation control, input and attention optimization, and hardware-aware inference. We explore cross-layer co-design strategies jointly optimizing model parameters, wireless transmissions, and edge resources. Finally, we identify open challenges of federated green learning, carbon-aware agency, 6th generation mobile communication (6G)-native Agentic AI, and self-sustaining systems, providing a roadmap for scalable autonomous intelligence.

Self-attention in Transformers generates dynamic operands that force conventional Compute-in-Memory (CIM) accelerators into costly non-volatile memory (NVM) reprogramming cycles, degrading throughput and stressing device endurance. Existing solutions either reduce but retain NVM writes through matrix decomposition or sparsity, or move attention computation to digital CMOS at the expense of NVM density. We present TrilinearCIM, a Double-Gate FeFET (DG-FeFET)-based architecture that uses back-gate modulation to realize a three-operand multiply-accumulate primitive for in-memory attention computation without dynamic ferroelectric reprogramming. Evaluated on BERT-base (GLUE) and ViT-base (ImageNet and CIFAR), TrilinearCIM outperforms conventional CIM on seven of nine GLUE tasks while achieving up to 46.6% energy reduction and 20.4% latency improvement over conventional FeFET CIM at 37.3% area overhead. To our knowledge, this is the first architecture to perform complete Transformer attention computation exclusively in NVM cores without runtime reprogramming.

Autonomous vehicles deployed in remote environments typically rely on embedded processors, compact batteries, and lightweight sensors. These hardware limitations conflict with the need to derive robust representations of the environment, which often requires executing computationally intensive deep neural networks for perception. To address this challenge, we present CADENCE, an adaptive system that dynamically scales the computational complexity of a slimmable monocular depth estimation network in response to navigation needs and environmental context. By closing the loop between perception fidelity and actuation requirements, CADENCE ensures high-precision computing is only used when mission-critical. We conduct evaluations on our released open-source testbed that integrates Microsoft AirSim with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. As compared to a state-of-the-art static approach, CADENCE decreases sensor acquisitions, power consumption, and inference latency by 9.67%, 16.1%, and 74.8%, respectively. The results demonstrate an overall reduction in energy expenditure by 75.0%, along with an increase in navigation accuracy by 7.43%.

We investigate the feasibility of real-time 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rasterisation on edge clients with varying Gaussian splat counts and GPU computational budgets. Instead of evaluating multiple physical devices, we adopt an emulation-based approach that approximates different GPU capability tiers on a single high-end GPU. By systematically under-clocking the GPU core frequency and applying power caps, we emulate a controlled range of floating-point performance levels that approximate different GPU capability tiers. At each point in this range, we measure frame rate, runtime behaviour, and power consumption across scenes of varying complexity, pipelines, and optimisations, enabling analysis of power-performance relationships such as FPS-power curves, energy per frame, and performance per watt. This method allows us to approximate the performance envelope of a diverse class of GPUs, from embedded and mobile-class devices to high-end consumer-grade systems. Our objective is to explore the practical lower bounds of client-side 3DGS rasterisation and assess its potential for deployment in energy-constrained environments, including standalone headsets and thin clients. Through this analysis, we provide early insights into the performance-energy trade-offs that govern the viability of edge-deployed 3DGS systems.

Continual learning (CL) on edge devices requires not only high accuracy but also training-time efficiency to support on-device adaptation under strict memory and computational constraints. While prompt-based continual learning (PCL) is parameter-efficient and achieves competitive accuracy, prior work has focused mainly on accuracy or inference-time performance, often overlooking the memory and computational costs of on-device training. In this paper, we propose CPS-Prompt, a critical patch-aware sparse prompting framework that explicitly targets training-time memory usage and computational cost by integrating critical patch sampling (CPS) for task-aware token reduction and decoupled prompt and classifier training (DPCT) to reduce backpropagation overhead. Experiments on three public benchmarks and real edge hardware show that CPS-Prompt improves peak memory, training time, and energy efficiency by about 1.6x over the balanced CODA-Prompt baseline, while maintaining accuracy within 2% of the state-of-the-art C-Prompt on average and remaining competitive with CODA-Prompt in accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/laymond1/cps-prompt.

This paper presents CBM-Dual, the first silicon-proven digital chaotic dynamics processor (CDP) supporting both simulated annealing (SA) and reservoir computing (RC). CBM-Dual enables real-time decision-making and lightweight adaptation for autonomous Edge AI, employing the largest-scale fully connected 1024-neuron chaotic Boltzmann machine (CBM). To address the high computational and area costs of digital CDPs, we propose: 1) a CBM-specific scheduler that exploits an inherently low neuron flip rate to reduce multiply-accumulate operations by 99%, and 2) an efficient multiply splitting scheme that reduces the area by 59%. Fabricated in 65nm (12mm$^2$), CBM-Dual achieves simultaneous heterogeneous task execution and state-of-the-art energy efficiency, delivering $\times$25-54 and $\times$4.5 improvements in the SA and RC fields, respectively.

As edge AI deployments scale to billions of devices running always-on, real-time compound AI pipelines, they represent a massive and largely unmanaged source of energy consumption and carbon emissions. To reduce carbon emissions while maximizing Quality-of-Service (QoS), this paper proposes FM-CAC, a proactive carbon-aware control framework that leverages a battery as an active temporal buffer. By decoupling energy acquisition from energy consumption, FM-CAC can maximize the use of low-carbon energy, substantially reducing carbon emissions. At each control step, FM-CAC jointly optimizes the software pipeline variant, the hardware operating point, and the battery charging and discharging actions. To support this decision process, FM-CAC leverages edge-friendly Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) for zero-shot carbon forecasting and integrates these forecasts into a dynamic programming solver with deferred cost attribution to prevent myopic battery depletion. Results show that FM-CAC reduces carbon emissions by up to 65.6% while maintaining near-maximum inference accuracy.

Artificial intelligence applications in autonomous driving, medical diagnostics, and financial systems increasingly demand machine learning models that can provide robust uncertainty quantification, interpretability, and noise resilience. Bayesian decision trees (BDTs) are attractive for these tasks because they combine probabilistic reasoning, interpretable decision-making, and robustness to noise. However, existing hardware implementations of BDTs based on CPUs and GPUs are limited by memory bottlenecks and irregular processing patterns, while multi-platform solutions exploiting analog content-addressable memory (ACAM) and Gaussian random number generators (GRNGs) introduce integration complexity and energy overheads. Here we report a monolithic FDSOI-FeFET hardware platform that natively supports both ACAM and GRNG functionalities. The ferroelectric polarization of FeFETs enables compact, energy-efficient multi-bit storage for ACAM, and band-to-band tunneling in the gate-to-drain overlap region and subsequent hole storage in the floating body provides a high-quality entropy source for GRNG. System-level evaluations demonstrate that the proposed architecture provides robust uncertainty estimation, interpretability, and noise tolerance with high energy efficiency. Under both dataset noise and device variations, it achieves over 40% higher classification accuracy on MNIST compared to conventional decision trees. Moreover, it delivers more than two orders of magnitude speedup over CPU and GPU baselines and over four orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency, making it a scalable solution for deploying BDTs in resource-constrained and safety-critical environments.

Classical computing is beginning to encounter fundamental limits of energy efficiency. This presents a challenge that can no longer be solved by strategies such as increasing circuit density or refining standard semiconductor processes. The growing computational and memory demands of artificial intelligence (AI) require disruptive innovation in how information is represented, stored, communicated, and processed. By leveraging novel device modalities and compute-in-memory (CIM), in addition to analog dynamics and sparse communication inspired by the brain, neuromorphic computing offers a promising path toward improvements in the energy efficiency and scalability of current AI systems. But realizing this potential is not a matter of replacing one chip with another; rather, it requires a co-design effort, spanning new materials and non-volatile device structures, novel mixed-signal circuits and architectures, and learning algorithms tailored to the physics of these substrates. This article surveys the key limitations of classical complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and outlines how such cross-layer neuromorphic approaches may overcome them.

AI training and deployment consume substantial electricity, but carbon outcomes remain weakly integrated into routine model development decisions. This paper presents Green AI Carbon Optimizer with two primary contributions: (i) a carbon aware cloud region recommendation method for training workloads, and (ii) a power law forecasting pipeline for global AI energy demand. For location recommendation, we combine regional grid carbon intensity, renewable share, and data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) into a unified scoring model across 100+ regions from major cloud providers. For a reference workload (8*A100, 100h), estimated emissions in our sampled regions range from 7.74kg to 272.00kg CO2. Selecting the best region instead of the worst corresponds to a 97.2% reduction relative to the worst case. Ablation shows that ranking by renewable share alone can select regions with higher CO2 emissions than rankings that include grid carbon intensity. For forecasting, we fit a power law relation between parameter count and training energy using 26 anchor models. We combine this fit with scenario assumptions on model growth, hardware efficiency, and training frequency, and evaluate sensitivity to inference ratio and ecosystem scaling. Across scenarios, projected 2030 demand ranges from 7TWh to 1,436TWh under the stated assumptions, highlighting the importance of deployment choices, model scaling discipline, and transparent energy reporting.

The rapid adoption of low-precision arithmetic in artificial intelligence and edge computing has created a strong demand for energy-efficient and flexible floating-point multiply-accumulate (MAC) units. This paper presents a dual-precision floating-point MAC processing element supporting FP8 (E4M3, E5M2) and FP4 (2 x E2M1, 2 x E1M2) formats, specifically optimized for low-power and high-throughput AI workloads. The proposed architecture employs a novel bit-partitioning technique that enables a single 4-bit unit multiplier to operate either as a standard 4 x 4 multiplier for FP8 or as two parallel 2 x 2 multipliers for 2-bit operands, achieving maximum hardware utilization without duplicating logic. Implemented in 28 nm technology, the proposed PE achieves an operating frequency of 1.94 GHz with an area of 0.00396 mm^2 and power consumption of 2.13 mW, resulting in up to 60.4% area reduction and 86.6% power savings compared to state-of-the-art designs, making it well suited for energy-constrained AI inference and mixed-precision computing applications when deployed within larger accelerator architectures.

Artificial intelligence is transforming molecular and materials science, but its growing computational and data demands raise critical sustainability challenges. In this Perspective, we examine resource considerations across the AI-driven discovery pipeline--from quantum-mechanical (QM) data generation and model training to automated, self-driving research workflows--building on discussions from the ``SusML workshop: Towards sustainable exploration of chemical spaces with machine learning'' held in Dresden, Germany. In this context, the availability of large quantum datasets has enabled rigorous benchmarking and rapid methodological progress, while also incurring substantial energy and infrastructure costs. We highlight emerging strategies to enhance efficiency, including general-purpose machine learning (ML) models, multi-fidelity approaches, model distillation, and active learning. Moreover, incorporating physics-based constraints within hierarchical workflows, where fast ML surrogates are applied broadly and high-accuracy QM methods are used selectively, can further optimize resource use without compromising reliability. Equally important is bridging the gap between idealized computational predictions and real-world conditions by accounting for synthesizability and multi-objective design criteria, which is essential for practical impact. Finally, we argue that sustainable progress will rely on open data and models, reusable workflows, and domain-specific AI systems that maximize scientific value per unit of computation, enabling efficient and responsible discovery of technological materials and therapeutics.

Smart shipping operations increasingly depend on collaborative AI, yet the underlying data are generated across vessels with uneven connectivity, limited backhaul, and clear commercial sensitivity. In such settings, server-coordinated FL remains a weak systems assumption, depending on a reachable aggregation point and repeated wide-area synchronization, both of which are difficult to guarantee in maritime networks. A serverless gossip approach therefore represents a more natural approach, but existing methods still treat communication mainly as an optimization bottleneck, rather than as a resource that must be managed jointly with carbon cost, reliability, and long-term participation balance. In this context, this paper presents CARGO, a carbon-aware gossip orchestration framework for smart-shipping. CARGO separates learning into a control and a data plane. The data plane performs local optimization with compressed gossip exchange, while the control plane decides, at each round, which vessels should participate, which communication edges should be activated, how aggressively updates should be compressed, and when recovery actions should be triggered. We evaluate CARGO under a predictive-maintenance scenario using operational bulk-carrier engine data and a trace-driven maritime communication protocol that captures client dropout, partial participation, packet loss, and multiple connectivity regimes, derived from mobility-aware vessel interactions. Across the tested stress settings, CARGO consistently remains in the high-accuracy regime while reducing carbon footprint and communication overheads, compared to accuracy-competitive decentralized baselines. Overall, the conducted performance evaluation demonstrates that CARGO is a feasible and practical solution for reliable and resource-conscious maritime AI deployment.

High-resolution sensors are critical for robust autonomous perception but impose a severe memory wall on battery-constrained electric vehicles. In these systems, data movement energy often outweighs computation. Traditional image compression is ill-suited as it is semantically blind and optimizes for storage rather than bus switching activity. We propose MotiMem, a hardware-software co-designed interface. Exploiting temporal coherence,MotiMem uses lightweight 2D Motion Propagation to dynamically identify Regions of Interest (RoI). Complementing this, a Hybrid Sparsity-Aware Coding scheme leverages adaptive inversion and truncation to induce bitlevel sparsity. Extensive experiments across nuScenes, Waymo, and KITTI with 16 detection models demonstrate that MotiMem reduces memory-interface dynamic energy by approximately 43 percent while retaining approximately 93 percent of the object detection accuracy, establishing a new Pareto frontier significantly superior to standard codecs like JPEG and WebP.

The migration of Large Language Models (LLMs) from cloud clusters to edge devices promises enhanced privacy and offline accessibility, but this transition encounters a harsh reality: the physical constraints of mobile batteries, thermal limits, and, most importantly, memory constraints. To navigate this landscape, we constructed a replicable and reproducible experimental pipeline to profile the complex interplay between energy consumption, latency, and quality of LLMs on mobile devices. We harness this pipeline to conduct an empirical case study on a flagship Android device, capturing granular metrics across eight LLMs ranging from 0.5B to 9B parameters without requiring root access, ensuring our findings reflect realistic user conditions. The findings highlight the trade-offs between generation quality, performance, power and resource consumption, revealing which LLMs offer the best balance across metrics and under different conditions. Besides, we uncovered a counter-intuitive quantization energy paradox: while modern importance-aware quantization successfully reduces memory footprints to fit larger models into RAM, we found it yields negligible energy savings compared to standard mixed-precision methods. This proves that for battery life, the architecture of the model, not its quantization scheme, is the decisive factor. We further identified that Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures defy the standard size-energy trend, offering the storage capacity of a 7B model while maintaining the lower energy profile of a 1B to 2B model. Finally, an analysis of these multi-objective trade-offs reveals a pragmatic sweet spot of mid-sized models, such as Qwen2.5-3B, that effectively balance response quality with sustainable energy consumption.

Medical edge-AI systems must operate under a difficult tension: delivering reliable diagnostic inference while running on devices with limited battery capacity, memory, and compute. In dermatology, this problem is amplified by real-world image degradation caused by smartphone capture, poor lighting, blur, compression, and heterogeneous edge sensors. To handle these degraded inputs, deploying a heavyweight model can improve reliability, but it rapidly increases the energy burden on resource-constrained devices. Conversely, always using a lightweight model saves energy but may be less reliable on ambiguous or degraded inputs. This paper introduces EcoFair, a vertically partitioned inference framework for dermatology classification in which image and tabular inputs remain local to edge clients while only learned modality-specific representations are transmitted for server-side fusion. EcoFair first processes each sample using a lightweight image encoder and then decides whether additional heavyweight computation is necessary. Escalation is triggered when the lightweight prediction exhibits high uncertainty, a narrow separation between safe and high-risk classes, or elevated metadata-derived risk from patient age and lesion location. Across HAM10000, BCN20000, and PAD-UFES-20, EcoFair is evaluated using multiple lightweight--heavy backbone pairings to quantify the trade-off between energy consumption, diagnostic performance, and worst-group malignant-case recall. Results show that EcoFair can reduce per-sample image-inference energy by up to 68% relative to always using the heavyweight encoder, while selectively allocating additional computation under difficult data regimes to support inference reliability. Group-level analysis further shows configuration-dependent effects, with improvements in selected model--dataset settings and mixed behaviour in others.

Efficient and adaptable deep learning models are an important area of deep learning research, driven by the need for highly efficient models on edge devices. Few-shot learning enables the use of deep learning models in low-data regimes, a capability that is highly sought after in real-world applications where collecting large annotated datasets is costly or impractical. This challenge is particularly relevant in edge scenarios, where connectivity may be limited, low-latency responses are required, or energy consumption constraints are critical. We propose and evaluate a pre-training method for the MobileViT backbone designed for edge computing. Specifically, we employ knowledge distillation, which transfers the generalization ability of a large-scale teacher model to a lightweight student model. This method achieves accuracy improvements of 14% and 6.7% for one-shot and five-shot classification, respectively, on the MiniImageNet benchmark, compared to the ResNet12 baseline, while reducing by 69% the number of parameters and by 88% the computational complexity of the model, in FLOPs. Furthermore, we deployed the proposed models on a Jetson Orin Nano platform and measured power consumption directly at the power supply, showing that the dynamic energy consumption is reduced by 37% with a latency of 2.6 ms. These results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising and practical solution for deploying few-shot learning models on edge AI hardware.

As the Web transitions from static retrieval to generative interaction, the escalating environmental footprint of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a critical sustainability challenge. Current paradigms indiscriminately apply computation-intensive strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to billions of daily queries, causing LLM overthinking, a redundancy that amplifies carbon emissions and operational barriers. This inefficiency directly undermines UN Sustainable Development Goals 13 (Climate Action) and 10 (Reduced Inequalities) by hindering equitable AI access in resource-constrained regions. To address this, we introduce EcoThink, an energy-aware adaptive inference framework designed to reconcile high-performance AI intelligence with environmental responsibility. EcoThink employs a lightweight, distillation-based router to dynamically assess query complexity, skipping unnecessary reasoning for factoid retrieval while reserving deep computation for complex logic. Extensive evaluations across 9 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that EcoThink reduces inference energy by 40.4% on average (up to 81.9% for web knowledge retrieval) without statistically significant performance loss. By mitigating algorithmic waste, EcoThink offers a scalable path toward a sustainable, inclusive, and energy-efficient generative AI Agent.

The rapid deployment of machine learning across platforms from milliwatt-class TinyML devices to large language models has made energy efficiency a primary constraint for sustainable AI. Across these scales, performance and energy are increasingly limited by data movement and memory-system behavior rather than by arithmetic throughput alone. This work reviews energy efficient software hardware codesign methods spanning edge inference and training to datacenter-scale LLM serving, covering accelerator architectures (e.g., ASIC/FPGA dataflows, processing-/compute-in-memory designs) and system-level techniques (e.g., partitioning, quantization, scheduling, and runtime adaptation). We distill common design levers and trade-offs, and highlight recurring gaps including limited cross-platform generalization, large and costly co-design search spaces, and inconsistent benchmarking across workloads and deployment settings. Finally, we outline a hierarchical decomposition perspective that maps optimization strategies to computational roles and supports incremental adaptation, offering practical guidance for building energy and carbon aware ML systems.

Federated Learning (FL) is constrained by the communication and energy limitations of decentralized edge devices. While gradient sparsification via Top-K magnitude pruning effectively reduces the communication payload, it remains inherently energy-agnostic. It assumes all parameter updates incur identical downstream transmission and memory-update costs, ignoring hardware realities. We formalize the pruning process as an energy-constrained projection problem that accounts for the hardware-level disparities between memory-intensive and compute-efficient operations during the post-backpropagation phase. We propose Cost-Weighted Magnitude Pruning (CWMP), a selection rule that prioritizes parameter updates based on their magnitude relative to their physical cost. We demonstrate that CWMP is the optimal greedy solution to this constrained projection and provide a probabilistic analysis of its global energy efficiency. Numerical results on a non-IID CIFAR-10 benchmark show that CWMP consistently establishes a superior performance-energy Pareto frontier compared to the Top-K baseline.

Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on power-sensitive edge devices presents a formidable challenge. While Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is widely employed for energy optimization, traditional model-level scaling is often too coarse to capture intra-inference variations, whereas fine-grained operator-level scaling suffers from prohibitive performance degradation due to significant hardware switching latency. This paper presents SparseDVFS, a fine-grained, sparse-aware DVFS framework designed for energy-efficient edge inference. Our key insight is that operator sparsity is a primary metric for hardware frequency modulation. By distinguishing between compute-bound dense operators and memory-bound sparse operators, the system can apply specialized frequency triplets to maximize energy efficiency. To overcome switching overheads and component interference, SparseDVFS incorporates three key innovations: (1) an offline modeler that established a deterministic mapping between operator sparsity and optimal frequency triplets (CPU/GPU/EMC) via white-box timeline analysis; (2) a runtime graph partitioner that utilizes a greedy merging heuristic to aggregate operators into super-blocks, balancing scaling granularity and DVFS switching latency through a latency amortization constraint; and (3) a unified co-governor that employs a frequency unified scaling engine (FUSE) and a look-ahead instruction queue to eliminate antagonistic effects between independent controllers and hide hardware transition latencies. Extensive evaluations show that SparseDVFS achieves an average 78.17% energy efficiency gain over state-of-the-art solutions while maintaining a superior 14% cost-gain ratio.

Energy efficiency remains a critical challenge in deploying physics-informed operator learning models for computational mechanics and scientific computing, particularly in power-constrained settings such as edge and embedded devices, where repeated operator evaluations in dense networks incur substantial computational and energy costs. To address this challenge, we introduce the Separable Physics-informed Neuroscience-inspired Operator Network (SPINONet), a neuroscience-inspired framework that reduces redundant computation across repeated evaluations while remaining compatible with physics-informed training. SPINONet incorporates regression-friendly neuroscience-inspired spiking neurons through an architecture-aware design that enables sparse, event-driven computation, improving energy efficiency while preserving the continuous, coordinate-differentiable pathways required for computing spatio-temporal derivatives. We evaluate SPINONet on a range of partial differential equations representative of computational mechanics problems, with spatial, temporal, and parametric dependencies in both time-dependent and steady-state settings, and demonstrate predictive performance comparable to conventional physics-informed operator learning approaches despite the induced sparse communication. In addition, limited data supervision in a hybrid setup is shown to improve performance in challenging regimes where purely physics-informed training may converge to spurious solutions. Finally, we provide an analytical discussion linking architectural components and design choices of SPINONet to reductions in computational load and energy consumption.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse applications, yet their deployment remains challenging due to substantial computational costs, memory requirements, and energy consumption. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that no single efficiency technique is universally optimal; instead, the effectiveness of methods such as efficient attention mechanisms, mixture-of-experts (MoE), parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and quantization varies significantly depending on task characteristics, resource constraints, and model scales. Building upon these insights, we propose AE-LLM, a unified framework that automatically selects and combines optimal efficiency techniques tailored to specific deployment scenarios. Our approach introduces a multi-objective optimization framework that jointly considers accuracy, latency, memory footprint, and energy consumption, while accounting for hardware constraints and task requirements. We develop an efficient search algorithm that explores the combinatorial space of efficiency techniques across architecture, fine-tuning, and inference stages, identifying Pareto-optimal configurations. Extensive experiments across 15 models (0.5B-70B parameters) and 10 diverse tasks demonstrate that AE-LLM achieves an average of $2.8\times$ improvement in efficiency metrics while maintaining competitive accuracy (within 1.2% of baseline), compared to static efficiency configurations. Furthermore, our framework generalizes effectively to vision-language models, achieving similar efficiency gains. Our contributions provide practitioners with an automated tool for navigating the complex trade-off landscape of LLM efficiency optimization.