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In today’s technology-driven world, lite devices like Internet of Things (IoT) devices and microcontrollers (MCUs) are becoming increasingly common. These devices are more energyefficient and affordable, often with reduced features compared to the standard versions such as very limited memory and processing power for typical machine learning models. However, modern machine learning models can have millions of parameters, resulting in a large memory footprint. This complexity not only makes it difficult to deploy these large models on resource constrained devices but also increases the risk of latency and inefficiency in processing, which is crucial in some cases where real-time responses are required such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics. In recent years, neural networks have seen significant advancements in model optimization techniques that help deployment and inference on these small devices. This narrative review offers a thorough examination of the progression and latest developments in neural network optimization, focusing on key areas such as quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, and neural architecture search. It examines how these algorithmic solutions have progressed and how new approaches have improved upon the existing techniques making neural networks more efficient. This review is designed for machine learning researchers, practitioners, and engineers who may be unfamiliar with these methods but wish to explore the available techniques. It highlights ongoing research in optimizing networks for achieving better performance, lowering energy consumption, and enabling faster training times, all of which play an important role in the continued scalability of neural networks. Additionally, it identifies gaps in current research and provides a foundation for future studies, aiming to enhance the applicability and effectiveness of existing optimization strategies.

Deep learning’s power stems from complex architectures; however, these can lead to overfitting, where models memorize training data and fail to generalize to unseen examples. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic approach to mitigate this issue. We introduce two key elements: Truncated Log-Uniform Prior and Truncated Log-Normal Variational Approximation, and Automatic Relevance Determination (ARD) with Bayesian Deep Neural Networks (BDNNs). Within the probabilistic framework, we employ a specially designed truncated log-uniform prior for noise. This prior acts as a regularizer, guiding the learning process towards simpler solutions and reducing overfitting. Additionally, a truncated log-normal variational approximation is used for efficient handling of the complex probability distributions inherent in deep learning models. ARD automatically identifies and removes irrelevant features or weights within a model. By integrating ARD with BDNNs, where weights have a probability distribution, we achieve a variational bound similar to the popular variational dropout technique. Dropout randomly drops neurons during training, encouraging the model not to rely heavily on any single feature. Our approach with ARD achieves similar benefits without the randomness of dropout, potentially leading to more stable training.

To evaluate our approach, we have tested the model on two datasets: the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR-10) for image classification and a dataset of Macroscopic Images of Wood, which is compiled from multiple macroscopic images of wood datasets. Our method is applied to established architectures like Visual Geometry Group (VGG) and Residual Network (ResNet). The results demonstrate significant improvements. The model reduced overfitting while maintaining, or even improving, the accuracy of the network’s predictions on classification tasks. This validates the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing the performance and generalization capabilities of deep learning models.