{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/carbon-aware-transformers-through-joint-model","title":"Carbon Aware Transformers Through Joint Model-Hardware Optimization","arxiv_id":"2505.01386","date":"2025-05-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Irene Wang","Newsha Ardalani","Mostafa Elhoushi","Daniel Jiang","Samuel Hsia","Ekin Sumbul","Divya Mahajan","Carole-Jean Wu","Bilge Acun"],"abstract":"The rapid growth of machine learning (ML) systems necessitates a more comprehensive evaluation of their environmental impact, particularly their carbon footprint, which comprises operational carbon from training and inference execution and embodied carbon from hardware manufacturing and its entire life-cycle. Despite the increasing importance of embodied emissions, there is a lack of tools and frameworks to holistically quantify and optimize the total carbon footprint of ML systems. To address this, we propose CATransformers, a carbon-aware architecture search framework that enables sustainability-driven co-optimization of ML models and hardware architectures. By incorporating both operational and embodied carbon metrics into early design space exploration of domain-specific hardware accelerators, CATransformers demonstrates that optimizing for carbon yields design choices distinct from those optimized solely for latency or energy efficiency. We apply our framework to multi-modal CLIP-based models, producing CarbonCLIP, a family of CLIP models achieving up to 17% reduction in total carbon emissions while maintaining accuracy and latency compared to state-of-the-art edge small CLIP baselines. This work underscores the need for holistic optimization methods to design high-performance, environmentally sustainable AI systems.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01386v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01386v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"carbon-aware-transformers-through-joint-model","repo_url":"https://github.com/facebookresearch/catransformers","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}