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Throughout its lifecycle, an LLM incurs significantly higher carbon emissions during inference than training. Inference requests vary in batch size, prompt length, and token generation, while cloud providers deploy heterogeneous GPU configurations to meet diverse service-level objectives. Unlike training, inference exhibits lower and highly variable hardware utilization, making equation-based carbon models unreliable. Existing network-based estimators lack accuracy, as they fail to account for the distinct prefill and decode phases, hardware-specific features, and realistic request distributions. We propose LLMCO₂, a graph neural network (GNN)-based model, to improve the accuracy of LLM inference carbon footprint estimation by ~ 67% over prior approaches. Source code is available at https://github.com/fuzhenxiao/LLMCO₂. 

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have focused primarily on scaling by increasing text-image pair data and enhancing LLMs to improve performance on multimodal tasks. However, these scaling approaches are computationally expensive and overlook the significance of efficiently improving model capabilities from the vision side. Inspired by the successful applications of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in LLMs, which improves model scalability during training while keeping inference costs similar to those of smaller models, we propose CuMo, which incorporates Co-upcycled Top-K sparsely-gated Mixtureof-experts blocks into both the vision encoder and the MLP connector, thereby enhancing the multimodal LLMs with neglectable additional activated parameters during inference. CuMo first pre-trains the MLP blocks and then initializes each expert in the MoE block from the pre-trained MLP block during the visual instruction tuning stage, with auxiliary losses to ensure a balanced loading of experts. CuMo outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs across various VQA and visual-instruction-following benchmarks within each model size group, all while training exclusively on open-sourced datasets.