arxivcs.CVcs.AI2026-07-10
Seeing is Free, Speaking is Not: Uncovering the True Energy Bottleneck in Edge VLM Inference
Junfei Zhan, Haoxun Shen, Mingang Guo, Zixuan Huang, Tengjiao He
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are the perceptual backbone of embodied AI, but their energy footprint on edge hardware remains poorly understood. Existing efficiency efforts focus predominantly on reducing visual tokens, implicitly treating visual processing as the dominant energy…