Energy Consumption of Deep Generative Audio Models
This addresses the environmental impact of deep learning research for the AI community, offering a tool to promote energy-efficient practices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing evaluation frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of high energy consumption in deep generative audio models by proposing a multi-objective measure based on Pareto optimality that balances model quality and energy use, showing it can drastically change the significance of results when applied to state-of-the-art models.
In most scientific domains, the deep learning community has largely focused on the quality of deep generative models, resulting in highly accurate and successful solutions. However, this race for quality comes at a tremendous computational cost, which incurs vast energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. At the heart of this problem are the measures that we use as a scientific community to evaluate our work. In this paper, we suggest relying on a multi-objective measure based on Pareto optimality, which takes into account both the quality of the model and its energy consumption. By applying our measure on the current state-of-the-art in generative audio models, we show that it can drastically change the significance of the results. We believe that this type of metric can be widely used by the community to evaluate their work, while putting computational cost -- and in fine energy consumption -- in the spotlight of deep learning research.