MELTing Point: Mobile Evaluation of Language Transformers

Transformers have recently revolutionized the machine learning (ML) landscape, gradually making their way into everyday tasks and equipping our computers with "sparks of intelligence". However, their runtime requirements have prevented them from being broadly deployed on mobile. As personal devices become increasingly powerful at the consumer edge and prompt privacy becomes an ever more pressing issue, we explore the current state of mobile execution of Large Language Models (LLMs). To achieve this, we have created our own automation infrastructure, MELT, which supports the headless execution and benchmarking of LLMs on device, supporting different models, devices and frameworks, including Android, iOS and Nvidia Jetson devices. We evaluate popular instruction fine-tuned LLMs and leverage different frameworks to measure their end-to-end and granular performance, tracing their memory and energy requirements along the way.