This dataset accompanies the paper "The Language–Energy Divide: Measuring Energy Costs of Multilingual LLM Inference." It releases the per-language energy measurements and the prompts used in the study, so researchers can build on our numbers without re-running the full sweep (≈ the entire measurement campaign).

⚡ Per-token energy varies by up to 8.3× across languages · 🔋 total energy per request set varies by up to 179× (English 17.6 kJ → Pashto 3,147 kJ) · 📉 the most energy-expensive languages are also the least accurate.

All energy is measured with the ML.ENERGY Benchmark (vLLM serving + the Zeus library) and reported as steady-state per-token energy. Hardware: NVIDIA L40S (main / cross-model / cross-task) and RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell (batch-size sweep).

📦 Contents

📊 results/ — energy measurements

Key columns: steady_energy_per_token_J (J/token), total_output_tokens, whole_gpu_energy_J, accuracy_strict / accuracy_lenient, resource_level (NLLB high/low).

📝 prompts/ — the data used

Each translated prompt record: id, prompt_en (source), prompt_tgt (translation), back_en (back-translation), bertscore_f1, comet. Translations passing the quality bar (BERTScore ≥ 0.85, COMET ≥ 0.75) were retained.

🌐 The 8-language subset

Four high-resource — English (Latin), Chinese (Hans), Russian (Cyrillic), French (Latin) — and four low-resource — Southern Pashto (Arabic), Tigrinya (Ethiopic), Shan (Myanmar), Tibetan (Tibetan) — used for the cross-model, cross-GPU, and cross-task experiments.

🧪 Quick start

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("hf://datasets/MichiganNLP/language-energy-divide/results/belebele_canonical_Qwen3-8B_0shot.csv")
df.sort_values("steady_energy_per_token_J").head()

📚 Citation & attribution

@article{language-energy-divide,
  title  = {The Language--Energy Divide: Measuring Energy Costs of Multilingual LLM Inference},
  author = {Deng, Naihao and Shen, Alissa and Feng, Yiming and Nwatu, Joan and
            Chung, Jae-Won and Chowdhury, Mosharaf and Chen, Yulong and Mihalcea, Rada},
  year   = {2026}
}

Built on: Belebele (Bandarkar et al., 2024, CC-BY-SA-4.0), GSM8K (Cobbe et al., 2021, MIT), LM-Arena / Chatbot Arena (Chiang et al., 2024), translation via NLLB-200 (NLLB Team, 2022), energy measurement via the ML.ENERGY Benchmark (Chung et al., 2025). Translated prompts derive from these sources; please also cite them and respect their licenses.

⚠️ Note on translations

GSM8K and LM-Arena prompts, and the Belebele per-language instructions/primers, are machine-translated (with QC), not natively authored. They may not fully reflect real-world usage of each language. Measured disparities are best read as a lower bound on what speakers of underserved languages face with natively authored inputs.