Research

Towards the Systematic Reporting of the Energy and Carbon Footprints of Machine Learning

November 30, 2020

Abstract

Accurate reporting of energy and carbon usage is essential for understanding the potential climate impacts of machine learning research. We introduce a framework that makes this easier by providing a simple interface for tracking realtime energy consumption and carbon emissions, as well as generating standardized online appendices. Utilizing this framework, we create a leaderboard for energy efficient reinforcement learning algorithms to incentivize responsible research in this area as an example for other areas of machine learning. Finally, based on case studies using our framework, we propose strategies for mitigation of carbon emissions and reduction of energy consumption. By making accounting easier, we hope to further the sustainable development of machine learning experiments and spur more research into energy efficient algorithms.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Peter Henderson

Jieru Hu

Joshua Romof

Emma Brunskill

Dan Jurafsky

Joelle Pineau

Publisher

ArXiv 2020

Related Publications

April 16, 2026

AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents

Karen Hambardzumyan, Nicolas Baldwin, Edan Toledo, Rishi Hazra, Michael Kuchnik, Bassel Al Omari, Thomas Simon Foster, Anton Protopopov, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Michael Shvartsman, Alisia Lupidi, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Parth Pathak, Tatiana Shavrina, Despoina Magka, Hela Momand, Derek Dunfield, Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Carole-Jean Wu, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach, Martin Josifoski

April 16, 2026

March 17, 2026

NLP

Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages

Omnilingual MT Team, Belen Alastruey, Niyati Bafna, Andrea Caciolai, Kevin Heffernan, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Christophe Ropers, Eduardo Sánchez, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Ioannis Tsiamas, Chierh CHENG, Joe Chuang, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Mark Duppenthaler, Nate Ekberg, Cynthia Gao, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, João Maria Janeiro, Jean Maillard, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Edan Toledo, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Rashel Moritz, Alexandre Mourachko, Surya Parimi, Mary Williamson, Shireen Yates, David Dale, Marta R. Costa-jussa

March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

Speech & Audio

Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech

Omnilingual SONAR Team, João Maria Janeiro, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Loic Barrault, Belen Alastruey, Yu-An Chung, Marta R. Costa-jussa, David Dale, Kevin Heffernan, Jaehyeong Jo, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Holger Schwenk, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne

March 17, 2026

February 27, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment

Yifu Qiu, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk

February 27, 2026

October 31, 2019

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

October 31, 2019

October 27, 2019

Order-Aware Generative Modeling Using the 3D-Craft Dataset | Facebook AI Research

Zhuoyuan Chen, Demi Guo, Tong Xiao, Saining Xie, Xinlei Chen, Haonan Yu, Jonathan Gray, Kavya Srinet, Haoqi Fan, Jerry Ma, Charles R. Qi, Shubham Tulsiani, Arthur Szlam, Larry Zitnick

October 27, 2019

April 25, 2020

Energy-Based Models for Atomic-Resolution Protein Conformations | Facebook AI Research

Yilun Du, Joshua Meier, Jerry Ma, Rob Fergus, Alexander Rives

April 25, 2020

June 11, 2019

Computer Vision

ELF OpenGo: An Analysis and Open Reimplementation of AlphaZero | Facebook AI Research

Yuandong Tian, Jerry Ma, Qucheng Gong, Shubho Sengupta, Zhuoyuan Chen, James Pinkerton, Larry Zitnick

June 11, 2019

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.