2025/09/15 by Zager, Florian, Gardi, Hamza A. A.
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.12380
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across a range of tasks, however their computational demands often make them unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. This paper explores strategies for compressing and adapting models to enable efficient inference in such environments. We focus on GhostNetV3, a state-of-the-art architecture for mobile applications, and propose GhostNetV3-Small, a modified variant designed to perform better on low-resolution inputs such as those in the CIFAR-10 dataset. In addition to architectural adaptation, we provide a comparative evaluation of knowledge distillation techniques, including traditional knowledge distillation, teacher assistants, and teacher ensembles. Experimental results show that GhostNetV3-Small significantly outperforms the original GhostNetV3 on CIFAR-10, achieving an accuracy of 93.94%. Contrary to expectations, all examined distillation strategies led to reduced accuracy compared to baseline training. These findings indicate that architectural adaptation can be more impactful than distillation in small-scale image classification tasks, highlighting the need for further research on effective model design and advanced distillation techniques for low-resolution domains.