Tiny but Mighty: A Software-Hardware Co-Design Approach for Efficient Multimodal Inference on Battery-Powered Small Devices

Researchers developed NANOMIND, a software-hardware framework that optimizes Large Multimodal Models for battery-powered devices by breaking them into modular components and mapping each to optimal accelerators. The system achieves 42.3% energy reduction and enables 20.8 hours of operation running LLaVA-OneVision on a compact device without network connectivity.