Mohammed Alnemari

Ye Qiao, Mohammed Alnemari, Nader Bagherzadeh

This paper proposes a novel two-stage framework for emotion recognition using EEG data that outperforms state-of-the-art models while keeping the model size small and computationally efficient. The framework consists of two stages; the first stage involves constructing efficient models named EEGNet, which is inspired by the state-of-the-art efficient architecture and employs inverted-residual blocks that contain depthwise separable convolutional layers. The EEGNet models on both valence and arousal labels achieve the average classification accuracy of 90%, 96.6%, and 99.5% with only 6.4k, 14k, and 25k parameters, respectively. In terms of accuracy and storage cost, these models outperform the previous state-of-the-art result by up to 9%. In the second stage, we binarize these models to further compress them and deploy them easily on edge devices. Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) typically degrade model accuracy. We improve the EEGNet binarized models in this paper by introducing three novel methods and achieving a 20\% improvement over the baseline binary models. The proposed binarized EEGNet models achieve accuracies of 81%, 95%, and 99% with storage costs of 0.11Mbits, 0.28Mbits, and 0.46Mbits, respectively. Those models help deploy a precise human emotion recognition system on the edge environment.

Mohammed Alnemari, Rizwan Qureshi, Nader Begrazadah

Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law with size, but existing work focuses on models above 100M parameters. The sub-20M regime -- where TinyML and edge AI operate -- remains unexamined. We train 90 models (22K--19.8M parameters) across two architectures (plain ConvNet, MobileNetV2) on CIFAR-100, varying width while holding depth and training fixed. Both follow approximate power laws in error rate: $α= 0.156 \pm 0.002$ (ScaleCNN) and $α= 0.106 \pm 0.001$ (MobileNetV2) across five seeds. Since prior work fit cross-entropy loss rather than error rate, direct exponent comparison is approximate; with that caveat, these are 1.4--2x steeper than $α\approx 0.076$ for large language models. The power law does not hold uniformly: local exponents decay with scale, and MobileNetV2 saturates at 19.8M parameters ($α_{\mathrm{local}} = 0.006$). Error structure also changes. Jaccard overlap between error sets of the smallest and largest ScaleCNN is only 0.35 (25 seed pairs, $\pm 0.004$) -- compression changes which inputs are misclassified, not merely how many. Small models concentrate capacity on easy classes (Gini: 0.26 at 22K vs. 0.09 at 4.7M) while abandoning the hardest (bottom-5 accuracy: 10% vs. 53%). Counter to expectation, the smallest models are best calibrated (ECE = 0.013 vs. peak 0.110 at mid-size). Aggregate accuracy is therefore misleading for edge deployment; validation must happen at the target model size.

Mohammed Alnemari

This paper presents a novel framework combining group equivariant convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) with equivariant-aware structured pruning to produce compact, transformation-invariant models for resource-constrained environments. Equivariance to rotations is achieved through the C4 cyclic group via the e2cnn library,enabling consistent performance under geometric transformations while reducing computational overhead. Our approach introduces structured pruning that preserves equivariant properties by analyzing e2cnn layer structure and applying neuron-level pruning to fully connected components. To mitigate accuracy degradation, we implement adaptive fine-tuning that automatically triggers when accuracy drop exceeds 2%, using early stopping and learning rate scheduling for efficient recovery. The framework includes dynamic INT8 quantization and a comprehensive pipeline encompassing training, knowledge distillation, structured pruning, fine-tuning, and quantization. We evaluate our method on satellite imagery (EuroSAT) and standard benchmarks (CIFAR-10, Rotated MNIST) demonstrating effectiveness across diverse domains. Experimental results show 29.3% parameter reduction with significant accuracy recovery, demonstrating that structured pruning of equivariant networks achieves substantial compression while maintaining geometric robustness. Our pipeline provides a reproducible framework for optimizing equivariant models, bridging the gap between group-theoretic network design and practical deployment constraints, with particular relevance to satellite imagery analysis and geometric vision tasks.