From Single-Shot QA to Continuous Perception: Revisiting the Energy Composition and Optimization Boundary of Edge VLMs
arXiv:2611.00036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-prefill energy conclusions for edge vision-language models (VLMs) are commonly drawn under single-shot workloads; we revisit them under continuous perception. Profiling nine VLMs across three architecture families on Jetson AGX Thor and Orin (4,508 records, calibrated with a pure-text task), we find two mutually independent energy laws: the per-output-token decode cost grows monotonically with model scale, whereas the visual-prefill (image-encoding) cost is dominated by visual-encoder architectural efficiency, not scale. Under continuous perception ($N{=}10$) with sparse output, visual-prefill energy reaches 92--97\% of total. We derive optimization strategies---visual frame reuse, adaptive output truncation, task-aware routing, and encoder throughput optimization---for edge VLM deployment.