---
title: "Lightweight neural networks research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “lightweight neural networks” appeared in 697 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (688), information systems (5) and operations research (3)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/lightweight-neural-networks
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/lightweight-neural-networks.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “lightweight neural networks” appeared in 697 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (688), information systems (5) and operations research (3). (as of 2026-11-03)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-03T18:03:37+09:00
window: 2026-10-05 to 2026-11-03
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “lightweight neural networks”

Research on “lightweight neural networks” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “lightweight neural networks” appeared in 697 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (688), information systems (5) and operations research (3).
- 184 of them were published in 2025, against 1 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (21), Harbin Institute of Technology (16) and Northeastern University (16).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (162), Pattern Recognition (85) and Knowledge-Based Systems (65).
- The most-cited of them is “U2-Net: Going deeper with nested U-structure for salient object detection” (Pattern Recognition, 2020), with 2,433 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 1 | 1 | 11 | 18 | 43 | 70 | 92 | 124 | 181 | 147 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| All categories | 1 | 1 | 11 | 18 | 44 | 72 | 92 | 125 | 184 | 149 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 162 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 85 |
| 3 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 65 |
| 4 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 44 |
| 5 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 43 |
| 6 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 33 |
| 7 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 26 |
| 8 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 21 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-artificial-intelligence.md) | 19 |
| 10 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 11 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 21 |
| 2 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 16 |
| 3 | [Northeastern University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northeastern-university.md) | 16 |
| 4 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 14 |
| 5 | [University of Electronic Science and Technology of China](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-electronic-science-and-technology-of-china.md) | 13 |
| 6 | [Sichuan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sichuan-university.md) | 12 |
| 7 | [South China University of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/south-china-university-of-technology.md) | 12 |
| 8 | [Central South University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/central-south-university.md) | 11 |
| 9 | [Hunan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hunan-university.md) | 10 |
| 10 | [Sun Yat-sen University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/sun-yat-sen-university.md) | 10 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 447 |
| 2 | United States | 30 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 28 |
| 4 | South Korea | 26 |
| 5 | Australia | 25 |
| 6 | India | 24 |
| 7 | Macao | 12 |
| 8 | Canada | 10 |
| 9 | Hong Kong | 10 |
| 10 | Germany | 8 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [computational efficiency](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/computational-efficiency.md) | 62 |
| 2 | [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 39 |
| 3 | [attention mechanism](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/attention-mechanism.md) | 37 |
| 4 | [feature fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/feature-fusion.md) | 29 |
| 5 | model compression | 29 |
| 6 | [multi-scale feature fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/multi-scale-feature-fusion.md) | 28 |
| 7 | edge computing | 25 |
| 8 | image super-resolution | 22 |
| 9 | Mamba | 20 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,433 | 31.4 | [U2-Net: Going deeper with nested U-structure for salient object detection](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2020.107404) | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 2020-05-16 | Xuebin Qin, Zichen Zhang, Chenyang Huang et al. |
| 2 | 737 | 10.5 | [Learning to Enhance Low-Light Image via Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2021.3063604) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2021-01-01 | Chongyi Li, Chunle Guo, Change Loy Chen |
| 3 | 537 | 9.6 | [Constructing Stronger and Faster Baselines for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2022.3157033) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2022-03-07 | Yifan Song, Zhang Zhang, Caifeng Shan et al. |
| 4 | 424 | 4.9 | [Lightweight Pyramid Networks for Image Deraining](https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2019.2926481) | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 2019-07-22 | Xueyang Fu, Borong Liang, Yue Huang et al. |
| 5 | 397 | 10.4 | [LiConvFormer: A lightweight fault diagnosis framework using separable multiscale convolution and broadcast self-attention](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121338) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2023-08-26 | Shen Yan, Haidong Shao, Jie Wang et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “lightweight neural networks”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/lightweight-neural-networks

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-lightweight-neural-networks,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “lightweight neural networks”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/lightweight-neural-networks}},
  urldate = {2026-11-03},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).