arXiv:2511.17031cs.LGcs.CV2025-11中稿 · ACM Conference on …

用计算量预测扩散模型能耗,助力绿色AI部署。

Energy Scaling Laws for Diffusion Models: Quantifying Compute in Image Generation

  • 基于FLOPs构建能量缩放定律,分解推理过程分析能耗来源。
  • 在多种模型与显卡上预测准确率超0.9,跨架构通用性强。
  • 适合关注算力效率、碳足迹评估的研究者与工程师。

扩散模型生成图像的计算需求快速增长,引发能源消耗与环境影响的担忧。现有节能方法多聚焦于架构优化或硬件加速,缺乏可预测不同模型配置与硬件组合下能耗的理论框架。本文将Kaplan缩放定律拓展至扩散模型,基于计算复杂度(FLOPs)预测GPU能耗。通过分解文本编码、迭代去噪和解码三部分,假设去噪操作因多步重复执行而主导能耗。在四个主流模型(Stable Diffusion 2、Stable Diffusion 3.5、Flux、Qwen)与三种GPU(NVIDIA A100、A4000、A6000)上,覆盖分辨率(256²–1024²)、精度(fp16/fp32)、步数(10–50)及无分类器引导等配置进行实验。结果表明,该能量缩放定律在单一架构内预测准确率均高于0.9(R² > 0.9),且在跨架构间保持强相关性,能可靠估算未见过的模型-硬件组合能耗。验证了扩散模型推理以计算为瓶颈,确立能耗预测作为可持续AI部署与碳足迹评估的基础。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The rapidly growing computational demands of diffusion models for image generation have raised significant concerns about energy consumption and environmental impact. While existing approaches to energy optimization focus on architectural improvements or hardware acceleration, there is a lack of principled methods to predict energy consumption across different model configurations and hardware setups. We propose an adaptation of Kaplan scaling laws to predict GPU energy consumption for diffusion models based on computational complexity (FLOPs). Our approach decomposes diffusion model inference into text encoding, iterative denoising, and decoding components, with the hypothesis that denoising operations dominate energy consumption due to their repeated execution across multiple inference steps. We conduct comprehensive experiments across four state-of-the-art diffusion models (Stable Diffusion 2, Stable Diffusion 3.5, Flux, and Qwen) on three GPU architectures (NVIDIA A100, A4000, A6000), spanning various inference configurations including resolution ($256^2$--$1024^2$), precision (fp16/fp32), step counts (10--50), and classifier-free guidance settings. Our energy scaling law achieves high predictive accuracy within individual architectures ($R^2 > 0.9$) and exhibits strong cross-architecture generalization, maintaining high rank correlations across models and enabling reliable energy estimation for unseen model--hardware combinations. These results validate the compute-bound nature of diffusion inference and establish energy consumption estimation as a necessary foundation for sustainable AI deployment planning and subsequent carbon footprint assessment.

扩散模型能耗预测缩放定律绿色AI

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