Energy-Efficient GPU DVFS for Fine-Tuning of SLMs on Resource-constrained Embedded Devices

Abstract

Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) on resource-constrained embedded GPU platforms is essential for energy-efficient small language model (SLM) fine-tuning, as privacy- and personalization-driven adaptation increasingly requires local execution and involves repeated forward-backward optimization over many mini-batches, making it substantially more time- and energy-intensive than single-pass inference. To this end, 1) we first characterize the fine-tuning behavior of representative encoder-only SLMs of BERT variants, and autoregressive decoder-only SLMs of Pythia variants on GLUE benchmarks. In addition to the characterizations, 2) we propose a simple yet effective ML-based model selection that selects energy-optimal GPU DVFS settings on resource-constrained embedded platforms. Our results on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin demonstrate average 13.11% energy savings (up to 26.73%) over MAXN Mode 0, which has no explicit power cap.