arXiv:2603.26603cs.SEcs.AI2026-03

对比手机端大模型性能、能耗与隐私的权衡,发现中等模型最省电且效果好。

Sustainability Is Not Linear: Quantifying Performance, Energy, and Privacy Trade-offs in On-Device Intelligence

  • 在真实安卓设备上实测8个不同大小的LLM,评估其能耗、速度与质量
  • 发现量化压缩不省电,模型架构比量化方式更影响续航
  • 混合专家模型(MoE)可存70亿参数却只耗10亿参数的电量,适合移动端

将大语言模型(LLMs)从云端迁移至移动设备虽能提升隐私保护和离线可用性,但面临电池容量、散热和内存等物理限制。本文构建了可复现的实验流程,在旗舰安卓设备上对8个参数量从0.5B到9B的LLM进行无Root权限的细致测评,涵盖能耗、延迟与生成质量。结果揭示了模型质量、性能、功耗与资源消耗间的复杂权衡,指出如Qwen2.5-3B这类中等规模模型在响应质量与可持续能耗间达到理想平衡。此外,发现现代重要性感知量化虽显著减少内存占用,但对能耗改善微乎其微,远不如标准混合精度方法;更意外的是,混合专家(MoE)架构打破常规,具备7B模型的存储能力,却仅消耗1B~2B模型的能耗水平。这表明,对于电池寿命而言,模型架构远比量化策略更具决定性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

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.

大模型移动端能耗优化MoE架构

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