Seeing is Free, Speaking is Not: Uncovering the True Energy Bottleneck in Edge VLM Inference
arXiv:2607.09520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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 cost. We overturn this implicit assumption through the first systematic energy profiling of on-device VLM inference, spanning five models across three architecture famil