# FastBoost: Progressive Attention with Dynamic Scaling for Efficient Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01026/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [CondConv: Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04971/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present FastBoost, a parameter-efficient neural architecture that achieves state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR benchmarks through a novel Dynamically Scaled Progressive Attention (DSPA) mechanism. Our design establishes new efficiency frontiers with: CIFAR-10: 95.57% accuracy (0.85M parameters) and 93.80% (0.37M parameters) CIFAR-100: 81.37% accuracy (0.92M parameters) and 74.85% (0.44M parameters) The breakthrough stems from three fundamental innovations in DSPA: (1) Adaptive Fusion: Learnt channel-spatial attention blending with dynamic weights. (2) Phase Scaling: Training-stage-aware intensity modulation (from 0.5 to 1.0). (3) Residual Adaptation: Self-optimized skip connections (gamma from 0.5 to 0.72). By integrating DSPA with enhanced MBConv blocks, FastBoost achieves a 2.1 times parameter reduction over MobileNetV3 while improving accuracy by +3.2 percentage points on CIFAR-10. The architecture features dual attention pathways with real-time weight adjustment, cascaded refinement layers (increasing gradient flow by 12.7%), and a hardware-friendly design (0.28G FLOPs). This co-optimization of dynamic attention and efficient convolution operations demonstrates unprecedented parameter-accuracy trade-offs, enabling deployment in resource-constrained edge devices without accuracy degradation.