Generative AI at the Edge: A Comprehensive Survey of Architectures, Hardware and Applications

A Unified Taxonomy of Deep Learning Optimizers for Scalable and Efficient AI Systems

A decision-oriented framework that translates theoretical insights into practical guidelines is introduced, establishing a structured foundation for broader communities to train and deploy human-centered AI systems sustainably and efficiently.

Toward Sustainable On-Device Intelligence: A Survey on Energy-Efficient RAG Systems with Small Language Models

Vision-centric generative AI models: A software-hardware perspective

Vision generative artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most rapidly advancing areas of deep learning. The explosion of multimodal models has made them widely associated with text-to-image applications running on large datacentres. However, vision generative models are equally needed in applications that operate under strict hardware constraints at the edge, including autonomous vehicles, agricultural sensors, and mobile devices. In this Perspective, we argue that progress in vision generative AI has been driven by output quality, with hardware evolving reactively to accommodate growing model demands. We quantify the parameter cost and energy efficiency of these models across a range of accelerator platforms, and map four generative model families against seven real-world application domains. Finally, we advocate a software-hardware co-design approach, where deployment constraints are considered from the start of the design process, ensuring that the"right model"runs on the"right hardware"to serve the"right application", making generative AI deployment sustainable and accessible across a much broader range of platforms.

Generative Communications: Overview, Technologies, and Trends

The groundbreaking development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly boosting the ability to generate content such as images and videos, reshaping communication paradigms. This article introduces generative communications (GenCom), a novel paradigm for 6G networks in which large AI models (LAMs) drive semantic understanding, reasoning, and content generation, embedding these into the communication process. Unlike traditional systems that strictly pursue accurate bit transmission, GenCom enables transmitters to convey only minimal yet sufficient information, while receivers leverage shared generative priors and knowledge bases to synthesize the intended output. Communication is thus redefined as controlled generation rather than data reproduction. We formalize the concept of GenCom, clarify its AI-native and generation-driven properties, and present its core mechanisms. A two-layer GenCom architecture supported by key enabling technologies is proposed, and analysis of four representative application scenarios demonstrates that GenCom offers ultra-efficient transmission, semantic-level robustness, and new network functions. Finally, we outline future research directions, including foundational theory and real-time processing, highlighting a promising pathway toward 6G networks.

Large Models for Small Devices: Recent Advances and Empirical Analysis of Edge AI Deployment

Running large AI models on resource-constrained edge devices requires model compression to reduce model size and computation. What compresses well, however, need not deploy well. We survey dozens of recent works that report compression results on real hardware and extract practical deployment guidelines from them. Following these guidelines, we deploy compact language and image models on GPU, CPU, and Raspberry Pi platforms across question answering and image segmentation. No single technique wins across tasks. For question answering, Qwen3.5 0.8B reaches 93.85 SQuAD F1 and 92 EM under Q5_K_M GGUF quantization, while structured pruning at the same precision costs 16 F1 at a 1% ratio. For segmentation, the ranking reverses: default quantization leaves parameters and MACs unchanged, whereas pruning cuts model size by nearly 80% at near-constant mIoU. Pruning can even inflate the deployed artifact by 21-49% by breaking k-quant super-block alignment; combined with longer, less format-compliant outputs, this raises Raspberry Pi latency up to 3.4x. Compression can also manufacture the appearance of competence rather than destroy it visibly: one LoRA-recovered variant stays fully parseable and holds 71% strict BoolQ accuracy while sending 97 of 100 predictions to a single class, at 52.6% balanced accuracy. We explain these effects through neural-flow graph analysis and prefill-decode-level latency decomposition, and condense them into task-specific deployment research directions. The right technique depends on the task, the model, and the hardware. Our experiment code and artifacts are open-sourced at https://github.com/Arnavvvkumar/deployment

LEMUR 2: Unlocking Neural Network Diversity for AI

This dataset defines a new basis for reproducible and data-driven AI design, advancing the emerging paradigm of LLM-driven AutoML and architectural generalization across modalities and hardware.