arXiv AI

A Reproducible Benchmark of Lightweight CNNs: Accuracy, Efficiency, and the Impact of Pretrained Initialization

arXiv:2505. 03303v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Lightweight convolutional neural networks are often compared using results obtained with different training recipes, input settings, and pretrained checkpoints.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

Adaptive AI: Energy Efficient Multi-exit TinyML on Intelligent Vision Systems at the Edge

The paper presents a novel multi‑exit computational scheme for TinyML on an ultra‑low‑power GAP9 SoC, adding confidence‑based gating points to a MobileNetV2 CNN for ImageNet‑100. By allowing inference to stop early, the approach cuts average MAC operations by 41 % (from 313 MMAC to 185 MMAC), reduces inference time by 29 % (49 ms to 35 ms), and saves 24 % in energy (2.1 mJ to 1.6 mJ per frame) with only a ~1 % drop in accuracy. Compared to a state‑of‑the‑art adaptive CNN on the same hardware, the method more than doubles computational efficiency, raising MAC/cycle from 8.1 to 17.2.

By Luca Crupi, Lorenzo Lamberti, Alessandro Giusti, Daniele Palossi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Group-Shared Low-Rank Approximation for Mobile-Efficient Pointwise Convolutions in Large-Kernel CNNs

The paper introduces Channel Group-Shared (CGS) low‑rank approximation, a Singular Value Decomposition–based strategy that shares down/up‑projection matrices across channel groups while using lightweight diagonal matrices for each group. This design dramatically cuts the parameter count of pointwise convolutions, which dominate the size of large‑kernel CNNs such as RepLKNet, ConvNeXt, and SLaK. Experiments show that CGS‑enhanced models maintain competitive accuracy while substantially reducing storage, memory bandwidth, and loading latency, making them viable for deployment on edge devices.

By Hao Luo, Yiting Yang, Wenyi Zhao, Man Jiang, Zhijun Lin, Ghulam Mohiuddin, Ting Jiang, Kunming Luo, Zihao Zhang, Qingsen Yan, Guoqing Wang, Wei Dong, Peng Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

The Unbearable Weight: Scaling Models and Methods for UAV Audio Classification

The paper investigates how to balance model size and fine‑tuning strategy for UAV audio classification. Using a dataset of 3,100 clips across 31 drone classes, it compares transformer and convolutional backbones under full fine‑tuning, classifier‑only fine‑tuning, and four parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning methods. Results show that selective batch‑norm tuning of EfficientNet‑B7 yields the best accuracy (97.65%) while updating less than 0.5% of parameters, and that lightweight CNNs generally outperform transformers in both accuracy and efficiency.

By Andrew P. Berg, Qian Zhang, Mia Y. Wang