# From Algorithm to Hardware: A Survey on Efficient and Safe Deployment of Deep Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06038 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06038/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 199 of its 332 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 199)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13630/) (2021)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LILogic Net: Compact Logic Gate Networks with Learnable Connectivity for Efficient Hardware Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12340/) (2025)
- [Hardware-Algorithm Co-Optimization of Early-Exit Neural Networks for Multi-Core Edge Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04705/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely used in many artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. However, deploying them brings significant challenges due to the huge cost of memory, energy, and computation. To address these challenges, researchers have developed various model compression techniques such as model quantization and model pruning. Recently, there has been a surge in research of compression methods to achieve model efficiency while retaining the performance. Furthermore, more and more works focus on customizing the DNN hardware accelerators to better leverage the model compression techniques. In addition to efficiency, preserving security and privacy is critical for deploying DNNs. However, the vast and diverse body of related works can be overwhelming. This inspires us to conduct a comprehensive survey on recent research toward the goal of high-performance, cost-efficient, and safe deployment of DNNs. Our survey first covers the mainstream model compression techniques such as model quantization, model pruning, knowledge distillation, and optimizations of non-linear operations. We then introduce recent advances in designing hardware accelerators that can adapt to efficient model compression approaches. Additionally, we discuss how homomorphic encryption can be integrated to secure DNN deployment. Finally, we discuss several issues, such as hardware evaluation, generalization, and integration of various compression approaches. Overall, we aim to provide a big picture of efficient DNNs, from algorithm to hardware accelerators and security perspectives.
