# A Survey on Approximate Edge AI for Energy Efficient Autonomous Driving Services

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14271/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 221 of its 439 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 221)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Empowering Edge Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey on On-Device AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06027/) (2025)
- [Investigating the Impact of Quantization on Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05639/) (2024)
- [Integration of Mixture of Experts and Multimodal Generative AI in Internet of Vehicles: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16356/) (2024)
- [Performance Analysis of Edge and In-Sensor AI Processors: A Comparative Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08725/) (2026)
- [Analyzing and Mitigating Bias for Vulnerable Classes: Towards Balanced Representation in Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10397/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Learning and Computing over Space-Ground Integrated Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14116/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Resource Gap: Deploying Advanced Imitation Learning Models onto Affordable Embedded Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11406/) (2024)
- [Breaking the Limits of Quantization-Aware Defenses: QADT-R for Robustness Against Patch-Based Adversarial Attacks in QNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07058/) (2025)
- [MAPS: Energy-Reliability Tradeoff Management in Autonomous Vehicles Through LLMs Penetrated Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06558/) (2024)
- [Asynchronous Fractional Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Age-Minimal Mobile Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16832/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Deep Multi-Task Learning in Connected Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00917/) (2025)
- [TriQDef: Disrupting Semantic and Gradient Alignment to Prevent Adversarial Patch Transferability in Quantized Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12132/) (2025)
- [Hardware-Algorithm Co-Optimization of Early-Exit Neural Networks for Multi-Core Edge Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04705/) (2025)
- [When Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Meets Wireless Communications: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06995/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving services rely heavily on sensors such as cameras, LiDAR, radar, and communication modules. A common practice of processing the sensed data is using a high-performance computing unit placed inside the vehicle, which deploys AI models and algorithms to act as the brain or administrator of the vehicle. The vehicular data generated from average hours of driving can be up to 20 Terabytes depending on the data rate and specification of the sensors. Given the scale and fast growth of services for autonomous driving, it is essential to improve the overall energy and environmental efficiency, especially in the trend towards vehicular electrification (e.g., battery-powered). Although the areas have seen significant advancements in sensor technologies, wireless communications, computing and AI/ML algorithms, the challenge still exists in how to apply and integrate those technology innovations to achieve energy efficiency. This survey reviews and compares the connected vehicular applications, vehicular communications, approximation and Edge AI techniques. The focus is on energy efficiency by covering newly proposed approximation and enabling frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first to review the latest approximate Edge AI frameworks and publicly available datasets in energy-efficient autonomous driving. The insights and vision from this survey can be beneficial for the collaborative driving service development on low-power and memory-constrained systems and also for the energy optimization of autonomous vehicles.