Energy Consumption Analysis of Discrete Diffusion and Autoregressive Language Models
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to scale, their energy consumption during inference has become a critical concern. While Autoregressive (AR) models are the industry standard, Diffusion Language Models (DLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative capable of parallel token generation. In this paper, we perform a comparative energy benchmark of diffusion models (LLaDA-8B, Dream-7B) against AR counterparts (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B). We analyze the trade-offs between model architecture, KV-cache optimization, and Joules-per-token efficiency. Our results show that at longer sequences (200--600 tokens), diffusion models achieve 2.5--2.7 J/token, approximately 2$\times$ more efficie...
| Authors | Boris Ruf, Marcin Detyniecki |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 15 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.