Darwinian Wiring: A Connectome-Constrained Structural Plasticity Framework for Extreme Model Compression

The deployment of lightweight object detectors on remote sensing edge platforms is severely constrained by the rigid trade-off between perception capacity and metabolic expenditure. To solve this fundamental challenge, we draw inspiration from the superior energy efficiency of the mammalian brain and the principles of connectomics to introduce CONERSLite. By emulating the dual mode synergy of biological neural systems, CONERSLite integrates a Compact Anatomical Backbone (CAB) representing the stable anatomical connectome and a Functional Connectome Router (FCR) that mimics the plasticity of the functional connectome. Our framework achieves a peak mAP of 82.35% on the DOTA-v1.0 dataset with only 28.3 M parameters and 195 G FLOPs, effectively establishing a new accuracy–efficiency Pareto frontier for remote sensing. On the HRSC2016 dataset, it reaches a state-of-the-art mAP of 98.62% while reducing the total parameter count by approximately 45% compared to high-precision optimized models like RTMDet. These results demonstrate that the application of connectomics principles provides a biologically grounded and highly efficient solution for resource-constrained remote sensing object detection.