# Knowledge Grafting: A Mechanism for Optimizing AI Model Deployment in Resource-Constrained Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19261/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [Model compression via distillation and quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05668/) (2018)
- [Pruning and Quantization for Deep Neural Network Acceleration: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09671/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Network Surgery for Efficient DNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04493/) (2016)
- [Designing Energy-Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks using Energy-Aware Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05128/) (2016)
- [An Analysis of Deep Neural Network Models for Practical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07678/) (2016)
- [DeepWeeds: A Multiclass Weed Species Image Dataset for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05726/) (2018)
- [CrossFuse: A Novel Cross Attention Mechanism based Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10581/) (2024)
- [Routing Experts: Learning to Route Dynamic Experts in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14093/) (2024)
- [Measuring the Energy Consumption and Efficiency of Deep Neural Networks: An Empirical Analysis and Design Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08151/) (2024)
- [Scalify: scale propagation for efficient low-precision LLM training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17353/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to larger, more complex models with numerous parameters that require substantial computing power -- resources often unavailable in many real-world application scenarios. Our paper addresses this challenge by introducing knowledge grafting, a novel mechanism that optimizes AI models for resource-constrained environments by transferring selected features (the scion) from a large donor model to a smaller rootstock model. The approach achieves an 88.54% reduction in model size (from 64.39 MB to 7.38 MB), while improving generalization capability of the model. Our new rootstock model achieves 89.97% validation accuracy (vs. donor's 87.47%), maintains lower validation loss (0.2976 vs. 0.5068), and performs exceptionally well on unseen test data with 90.45% accuracy. It addresses the typical size vs performance trade-off, and enables deployment of AI frameworks on resource-constrained devices with enhanced performance. We have tested our approach on an agricultural weed detection scenario, however, it can be extended across various edge computing scenarios, potentially accelerating AI adoption in areas with limited hardware/software support -- by mirroring in a similar manner the horticultural grafting enables productive cultivation in challenging agri-based environments.