Comparative Analysis of Lightweight CNNs for Resource-Constrained Devices: Predictive Performance, Efficiency Trade-offs, and Initialization Effects
Lightweight convolutional neural networks are often compared using results obtained with different training recipes, input settings, and pretrained checkpoints. Such differences make architecture rankings difficult to interpret. This study presents a controlled benchmark of seven established CNNs across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet under a shared fine tuning protocol. The evaluation reports top-1 accuracy, macro F1, top-5 accuracy, parameter count, FP32 parameter storage, and multiply accumulate operations. EfficientNetV2-S records the highest observed top-1 accuracy on all three datasets, reaching 97.57%, 86.98%, and 78.73%. EfficientNet-B0 remains within 0.85 percentage points of EfficientNetV2-S across the three datasets while requiring only about 21% of its parameters and 14% of its multiply accumulate operations on Tiny ImageNet. It therefore offers a favorable general balance between predictive performance and computational demand. MobileNetV3-Small is a strong candidate for ultra low resource settings. It uses about 40% of the parameters and 15% of the multiply accumulate operations of EfficientNet-B0 while retaining competitive accuracy. A matched comparison of ImageNet pretrained and randomly initialized EfficientNet-B0 and MobileNetV3-Small models shows that the pretrained advantage is substantially larger on CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet than on CIFAR-10 under the fixed protocol. The results provide a focused reference for selecting established lightweight CNNs when predictive quality, parameter storage, and theoretical computation must be considered together.