Fernando Castor

Lola Solovyeva, Fernando Castor

Context: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in modern software development, aiding in code generation, code completion, and refactoring through AI-powered assistants. While they accelerate development workflows, they often produce extraneous output, referred to as "babbling", which incurs additional cognitive, economic, and energy costs. Objective: This work investigates the problem of babbling in LLM-based code generation and proposes a practical, model-agnostic approach to reduce unnecessary output without compromising solution accuracy. Method: We introduce Babbling Suppression (BS), a method that integrates test execution into the LLM generation process by evaluating intermediate outputs and terminating generation once a solution passes all tests. This prevents excessive token generation while having no impact on model accuracy. An empirical study was conducted across two Python and two Java benchmarks, targeting four 3-4B parameter models and six 6-7B parameter models. Results: Our findings show that babbling occurs across all tested models, with higher frequency in Java than in Python. Applying BS significantly reduces energy consumption by up to 65% for Python and 62% for Java in models prone to babbling. Across 40 model-benchmark pairs, 29 showed reduced mean energy consumption, with reductions exceeding 20% in 22 cases. Generated token count decreased in 35 pairs, while the GPU energy-per-token overhead of BS remained below 10% for 26 pairs, decreased for 2, and reached a maximum of 24%, yielding net energy savings in most cases. Implications: BS can make AI-assisted programming more efficient and sustainable by reducing energy consumption and minimizing cognitive effort by developers. Its model-agnostic design allows easy integration, suggesting broad applicability.

Sophie Weidmann, Fernando Castor

Although LLMs are capable of generating functionally correct code, they also tend to produce less energy-efficient code in comparison to human-written solutions. As these inefficiencies lead to higher computational overhead, they are in direct conflict with Green Software Development (GSD) efforts, which aim to reduce the energy consumption of code. To support these efforts, this study aims to investigate whether and how LLMs can be optimized to promote the generation of energy-efficient code. To this end, we employ Contrastive Prompt Tuning (CPT). CPT combines Contrastive Learning techniques, which help the model to distinguish between efficient and inefficient code, and Prompt Tuning, a Parameter-Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) approach that requires only a fraction of the cost of traditional fine tuning. This study evaluates CPT on Python, Java and C++ coding problems across three different models to provide a comprehensive evaluation. The method achieves consistent improvements in code accuracy for two models but efficiency gains vary by model, language and task complexity, indicating that improvements are not uniformly reliable.

Lola Solovyeva, Fernando Castor

Context: AI-assisted tools are increasingly integrated into software development workflows, but their reliance on large language models (LLMs) introduces substantial computational and energy costs. Understanding and reducing the energy footprint of LLM inference is therefore essential for sustainable software development. Objective: In this study, we conduct a phase-level analysis of LLM inference energy consumption, distinguishing between the (1) prefill, where the model processes the input and builds internal representations, and (2) decoding, where output tokens are generated using the stored state. Method: We investigate six 6B-7B and four 3B-4B transformer-based models, evaluating them on code-centric benchmarks HumanEval for code generation and LongBench for code understanding. Results: Our findings show that, within both parameter groups, models exhibit distinct energy patterns across phases. Furthermore, we observed that increases in prefill cost amplify the energy cost per token during decoding, with amplifications ranging from 1.3% to 51.8% depending on the model. Lastly, three out of ten models demonstrate babbling behavior, adding excessive content to the output that unnecessarily inflates energy consumption. We implemented babbling suppression for code generation, achieving energy savings ranging from 44% to 89% without affecting generation accuracy. Conclusion: These findings show that prefill costs influence decoding, which dominates energy consumption, and that babbling suppression can yield up to 89% energy savings. Reducing inference energy therefore requires both mitigating babbling behavior and limiting impact of prefill on decoding.

Negar Alizadeh, Fernando Castor

Deep Learning (DL) frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow include runtime infrastructures responsible for executing trained models on target hardware, managing memory, data transfers, and multi-accelerator execution, if applicable. Additionally, it is a common practice to deploy pre-trained models on environments distinct from their native development settings. This led to the introduction of interchange formats such as ONNX, which includes its runtime infrastructure, and ONNX Runtime, which work as standard formats that can be used across diverse DL frameworks and languages. Even though these runtime infrastructures have a great impact on inference performance, no previous paper has investigated their energy efficiency. In this study, we monitor the energy consumption and inference time in the runtime infrastructures of three well-known DL frameworks as well as ONNX, using three various DL models. To have nuance in our investigation, we also examine the impact of using different execution providers. We find out that the performance and energy efficiency of DL are difficult to predict. One framework, MXNet, outperforms both PyTorch and TensorFlow for the computer vision models using batch size 1, due to efficient GPU usage and thus low CPU usage. However, batch size 64 makes PyTorch and MXNet practically indistinguishable, while TensorFlow is outperformed consistently. For BERT, PyTorch exhibits the best performance. Converting the models to ONNX yields significant performance improvements in the majority of cases. Finally, in our preliminary investigation of execution providers, we observe that TensorRT always outperforms CUDA.

Luís Cruz, João Paulo Fernandes, Maja H. Kirkeby et al.

The environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled systems is increasing rapidly, and software engineering plays a critical role in developing sustainable solutions. The "Greening AI with Software Engineering" CECAM-Lorentz workshop (no. 1358, 2025) funded by the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire and the Lorentz Center, provided an interdisciplinary forum for 29 participants, from practitioners to academics, to share knowledge, ideas, practices, and current results dedicated to advancing green software and AI research. The workshop was held February 3-7, 2025, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through keynotes, flash talks, and collaborative discussions, participants identified and prioritized key challenges for the field. These included energy assessment and standardization, benchmarking practices, sustainability-aware architectures, runtime adaptation, empirical methodologies, and education. This report presents a research agenda emerging from the workshop, outlining open research directions and practical recommendations to guide the development of environmentally sustainable AI-enabled systems rooted in software engineering principles.

Delano Oliveira, Reydne Bruno, Fernanda Madeiral et al.

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code readability, i.e., what makes a program easier or harder to read and apprehend by developers, and code legibility, i.e., what influences the ease of identifying elements of a program. These studies evaluate readability and legibility by means of different comprehension tasks and response variables. In this paper, we examine these tasks and variables in studies that compare programming constructs, coding idioms, naming conventions, and formatting guidelines, e.g., recursive vs. iterative code. To that end, we have conducted a systematic literature review where we found 54 relevant papers. Most of these studies evaluate code readability and legibility by measuring the correctness of the subjects' results (83.3%) or simply asking their opinions (55.6%). Some studies (16.7%) rely exclusively on the latter variable.There are still few studies that monitor subjects' physical signs, such as brain activation regions (5%). Moreover, our study shows that some variables are multi-faceted. For instance, correctness can be measured as the ability to predict the output of a program, answer questions about its behavior, or recall parts of it. These results make it clear that different evaluation approaches require different competencies from subjects, e.g., tracing the program vs. summarizing its goal vs. memorizing its text. To assist researchers in the design of new studies and improve our comprehension of existing ones, we model program comprehension as a learning activity by adapting a preexisting learning taxonomy. This adaptation indicates that some competencies are often exercised in these evaluations whereas others are rarely targeted.

Wellington Oliveira, Hugo Matalonga, Gustavo Pinto et al.

In the last few years, a growing body of research has proposed methods, techniques, and tools to support developers in the construction of software that consumes less energy. These solutions leverage diverse approaches such as version history mining, analytical models, identifying energy-efficient color schemes, and optimizing the packaging of HTTP requests. In this chapter, we present a complementary approach. We advocate that developers should leverage software diversity to make software systems more energy-efficient. Our main insight is that non-specialists can build software that consumes less energy by alternating at development time between readily available, diversely-designed pieces of software implemented by third-parties. These pieces of software can vary in nature, granularity, and quality attributes. Examples include data structures and constructs for thread management and synchronization.