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Abstract - EcoThink: A Green Adaptive Inference Framework for Sustainable and Accessible Agents
As the Web transitions from static retrieval to generative interaction, the escalating environmental footprint of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a critical sustainability challenge. Current paradigms indiscriminately apply computation-intensive strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to billions of daily queries, causing LLM overthinking, a redundancy that amplifies carbon emissions and operational barriers. This inefficiency directly undermines UN Sustainable Development Goals 13 (Climate Action) and 10 (Reduced Inequalities) by hindering equitable AI access in resource-constrained regions. To address this, we introduce EcoThink, an energy-aware adaptive inference framework designed to reconcile high-performance AI intelligence with environmental responsibility. EcoThink employs a lightweight, distillation-based router to dynamically assess query complexity, skipping unnecessary reasoning for factoid retrieval while reserving deep computation for complex logic. Extensive evaluations across 9 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that EcoThink reduces inference energy by 40.4% on average (up to 81.9% for web knowledge retrieval) without statistically significant performance loss. By mitigating algorithmic waste, EcoThink offers a scalable path toward a sustainable, inclusive, and energy-efficient generative AI Agent.
EcoThink:一个面向可持续与可访问智能体的绿色自适应推理框架 /
EcoThink: A Green Adaptive Inference Framework for Sustainable and Accessible Agents
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文提出了一个名为EcoThink的节能自适应推理框架,它通过一个轻量级路由器智能判断查询的复杂度,从而为简单问题跳过复杂推理、为复杂问题保留深度计算,在基本不影响性能的前提下平均降低40.4%的推理能耗,为实现可持续且普惠的生成式AI提供了一条可行路径。