MobiBench: Benchmarking LLMs for On-Device Performance

Abstract

Understanding how large language models (LLMs) perform under real-world resource constraints has become more crucial due to the growing demand for deploying LLMs on mobile and edge devices. While there are a number of execution frameworks for on-device inference, the evaluation of llama.cpp as the runtime is the sole focus of this work. This work, presents a unified benchmarking suite that uses llama.cpp to thoroughly evaluate the performance of edge-optimized LLMs in a variety of hardware settings. The benchmark includes both user-facing metrics (task-specific accuracy, prefill speed, decode speed, time-to-first-token, etc.) and system-level measurements (memory consumption, battery consumption, etc.) and covers a fairly varied set of representative natural language tasks, such as summarization and question-answering. This paper present a comparative analysis that identifies important trade-offs resulting from model architecture and hardware features by methodically assessing several lightweight models on commercial system-onchips (SoCs) and CPU/GPU platforms. In order to guide future developments in model optimization, runtime development, and edge-device hardware design for effective large-scale language intelligence, the benchmark lays the groundwork for repeatable and thorough evaluation of on-device LLMs using a single, widely used runtime.