Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kumar, Abhas, Pathak, Kapil, Kavuru, Rajesh, Srinivasan, Prabhakar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02602
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910725801246720
author Kumar, Abhas
Pathak, Kapil
Kavuru, Rajesh
Srinivasan, Prabhakar
author_facet Kumar, Abhas
Pathak, Kapil
Kavuru, Rajesh
Srinivasan, Prabhakar
contents This paper analyzes the performance of Small Language Models (SLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) and evaluates the trade-off between model performance and carbon emissions across 4 essential tasks: Image Captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Dialogue Summarization and Text-to-SQL conversion. Various SLMs and VLMs belonging to the Qwen and LLaMA architecture family are chosen and variants based on model size in terms of the number of parameters, quantization level and fine-tuning parameters are evaluated. The model variant's performance and carbon emissions are calculated. To quantify the trade-off between model performance and carbon emissions, we introduce a novel metric called CEGI (Carbon Efficient Gain Index). This metric represents the carbon emission per unit percentage gain per million trainable parameters . This metric provides a normalized measure to compare model's efficiency in terms of performance improvement relative to their environmental cost. The experiment's outcome demonstrates that fine-tuning SLMs and VLMs can achieve performance levels comparable to Large Language Models (LLMs) while producing significantly less carbon emissions. Our findings suggest that the marginal gains in accuracy from larger models do not justify the substantial increase in carbon emissions. Leveraging lower-bit quantization levels, the proposed metric further enhances energy efficiency without compromising performance. This study highlights balancing high performance and environmental sustainability. It offers a valuable metric for selecting models suitable for environmentally-friendly AI development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02602
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CEGI: Measuring the trade-off between efficiency and carbon emissions for SLMs and VLMs
Kumar, Abhas
Pathak, Kapil
Kavuru, Rajesh
Srinivasan, Prabhakar
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
This paper analyzes the performance of Small Language Models (SLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) and evaluates the trade-off between model performance and carbon emissions across 4 essential tasks: Image Captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Dialogue Summarization and Text-to-SQL conversion. Various SLMs and VLMs belonging to the Qwen and LLaMA architecture family are chosen and variants based on model size in terms of the number of parameters, quantization level and fine-tuning parameters are evaluated. The model variant's performance and carbon emissions are calculated. To quantify the trade-off between model performance and carbon emissions, we introduce a novel metric called CEGI (Carbon Efficient Gain Index). This metric represents the carbon emission per unit percentage gain per million trainable parameters . This metric provides a normalized measure to compare model's efficiency in terms of performance improvement relative to their environmental cost. The experiment's outcome demonstrates that fine-tuning SLMs and VLMs can achieve performance levels comparable to Large Language Models (LLMs) while producing significantly less carbon emissions. Our findings suggest that the marginal gains in accuracy from larger models do not justify the substantial increase in carbon emissions. Leveraging lower-bit quantization levels, the proposed metric further enhances energy efficiency without compromising performance. This study highlights balancing high performance and environmental sustainability. It offers a valuable metric for selecting models suitable for environmentally-friendly AI development.
title CEGI: Measuring the trade-off between efficiency and carbon emissions for SLMs and VLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02602