NLP

COMPUTER VISION

The Framework Tax: Disparities Between Inference Efficiency in NLP Research and Deployment

November 07, 2023

Abstract

Increased focus on the computational efficiency of NLP systems has motivated the design of efficient model architectures and improvements to underlying hardware accelerators. However, the resulting increases in computational throughput and reductions in floating point operations have not directly translated to improvements in wall-clock inference latency. We demonstrate that these discrepancies can be largely attributed to bottlenecks introduced by deep learning frameworks. We denote this phenomenon as the framework tax, and observe that the disparity is growing as hardware speed increases over time. In this work, we examine this phenomenon through a series of case studies analyzing the effects of model design decisions, framework paradigms, and hardware platforms on total model latency.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Jared Fernandez

Jacob Kahn

Clara Na

Yonatan Bisk

Emma Strubell

Publisher

EMNLP

Related Publications

February 27, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment

Yifu Qiu, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk

February 27, 2026

February 11, 2026

RESEARCH

COMPUTER VISION

UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling

Leon Liangyu Chen, Haoyu Ma, Zhipeng Fan, Ziqi Huang, Animesh Sinha, Xiaoliang Dai, Jialiang Wang, Zecheng He, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Junzhe Sun, Chu Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy, Felix Juefei-Xu

February 11, 2026

February 10, 2026

NLP

AIRS-Bench: a Suite of Tasks for Frontier AI Research Science Agents

Alisia Lupidi, Bhavul Gauri, Thomas Simon Foster, Bassel Al Omari, Despoina Magka, Alberto Pepe, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Muna Aghamelu, Nicolas Baldwin, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Chee Hau Leow, Sandra Lefdal, Hossam Mossalam, Abhinav Moudgil, Saba Nazir, Emanuel Tewolde, Isabel Urrego, Jordi Armengol-Estape, Amar Budhiraja, Gaurav Chaurasia, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Karen Hambardzumyan, Daniel Izcovich, Martin Josifoski, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Parth Pathak, Michael Shvartsman, Edan Toledo, Anton Protopopov, Roberta Raileanu, Alexander Miller, Tatiana Shavrina, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach

February 10, 2026

January 02, 2026

COMPUTER VISION

PhyGDPO: Physics-Aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization for Physically Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

Yuanhao Cai, Kunpeng Li, Menglin Jia, Jialiang Wang, Junzhe Sun, Feng Liang, Weifeng Chen, Felix Xu, Chu Wang, Ali Thabet, Xiaoliang Dai, Xuan Ju, Alan Yuille, Ji Hou

January 02, 2026

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.