XiYOLO: Energy-Aware Object Detection via Iterative Architecture Search and Scaling

Object detection on heterogeneous edge devices must satisfy strict energy, latency, and memory constraints while still providing reliable perception for downstream autonomy. Existing energy-aware NAS methods often target limited deployment settings, while real energy remains difficult to optimize because it is highly device-dependent and costly to measure. We address these challenges with an energy-adaptive framework that combines an energy-aware XiResOFA search space, a two-stage energy estimator, and iterative search to identify a single energy-efficient base architecture. We then apply compound scaling to transform this base design into the XiYOLO family across deployment budgets, enabling interpretable accuracy-energy tradeoffs under sparse hardware measurements. Experiments on PascalVOC, COCO, and real-device deployment show that XiYOLO achieves a stronger energy-accuracy tradeoff than YOLO baselines. On PascalVOC, the medium XiYOLO model reaches 86.15 mAP50 while reducing energy relative to YOLOv12m by 20.6% on GPU and 35.9% on NPU. On COCO, XiYOLO reduces energy relative to YOLOv12 by up to 53.7% on GPU and 51.6% on NPU at the small scale. The proposed two-stage estimator also improves sample efficiency over a joint predictor under few-shot adaptation with only 2-20 target-device samples.