Efficient Deployment of Vision-Language Models on Mobile Devices: A Case Study on OnePlus 13R
It addresses deployment challenges for VLMs on mobile devices, but is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking existing frameworks without proposing new solutions.
This study benchmarked deployment frameworks for Vision-Language Models on mobile devices, identifying critical bottlenecks such as CPU over-utilization and ineffective GPU/NPU usage, with measurements including inference time and power consumption on a OnePlus 13R.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising capabilities for mobile devices, but their deployment faces significant challenges due to computational limitations and energy inefficiency, especially for real-time applications. This study provides a comprehensive survey of deployment frameworks for VLMs on mobile devices, evaluating llama.cpp, MLC-Imp, and mllm in the context of running LLaVA-1.5 7B, MobileVLM-3B, and Imp-v1.5 3B as representative workloads on a OnePlus 13R. Each deployment framework was evaluated on the OnePlus 13R while running VLMs, with measurements covering CPU, GPU, and NPU utilization, temperature, inference time, power consumption, and user experience. Benchmarking revealed critical performance bottlenecks across frameworks: CPU resources were consistently over-utilized during token generation, while GPU and NPU accelerators were largely unused. When the GPU was used, primarily for image feature extraction, it was saturated, leading to degraded device responsiveness. The study contributes framework-level benchmarks, practical profiling tools, and an in-depth analysis of hardware utilization bottlenecks, highlighting the consistent overuse of CPUs and the ineffective or unstable use of GPUs and NPUs in current deployment frameworks.