TG-NAS: Generalizable Zero-Cost Proxies with Operator Description Embedding and Graph Learning for Efficient Neural Architecture Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Qiao, Ye, Li, Jingcheng, Xu, Haocheng, Huang, Sitao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Qiao, Ye
Li, Jingcheng
Xu, Haocheng
Huang, Sitao
author_facet Qiao, Ye
Li, Jingcheng
Xu, Haocheng
Huang, Sitao
contents Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful technique for discovering high-performing CNN architectures, but most existing methods rely on costly training or extensive sampling. Zero-shot NAS offers a training-free alternative by using proxies to predict architecture performance. However, existing proxies are often suboptimal -- frequently outperformed by simple metrics like parameter count or FLOPs -- and they generalize poorly across different search spaces. Moreover, current model-based proxies struggle to adapt to new operators without access to ground-truth accuracy, limiting their transferability. We propose TG-NAS, a universal, model-based zero-cost (ZC) proxy that combines a Transformer-based operator embedding generator with a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict architecture performance. Unlike prior model-based predictors, TG-NAS requires no retraining and generalizes across arbitrary search spaces. It serves as a standalone ZC proxy with strong data efficiency, robustness, and cross-space consistency. Extensive evaluations across diverse NAS benchmarks demonstrate TG-NAS's superior rank correlation and generalizability compared to existing proxies. Additionally, it improves search efficiency by up to 300x and discovers architectures achieving 93.75% CIFAR-10 accuracy on NAS-Bench-201 and 74.9% ImageNet top-1 accuracy on the DARTS space, establishing TG-NAS as a promising foundation for efficient, generalizable NAS.
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spellingShingle TG-NAS: Generalizable Zero-Cost Proxies with Operator Description Embedding and Graph Learning for Efficient Neural Architecture Search
Qiao, Ye
Li, Jingcheng
Xu, Haocheng
Huang, Sitao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful technique for discovering high-performing CNN architectures, but most existing methods rely on costly training or extensive sampling. Zero-shot NAS offers a training-free alternative by using proxies to predict architecture performance. However, existing proxies are often suboptimal -- frequently outperformed by simple metrics like parameter count or FLOPs -- and they generalize poorly across different search spaces. Moreover, current model-based proxies struggle to adapt to new operators without access to ground-truth accuracy, limiting their transferability. We propose TG-NAS, a universal, model-based zero-cost (ZC) proxy that combines a Transformer-based operator embedding generator with a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict architecture performance. Unlike prior model-based predictors, TG-NAS requires no retraining and generalizes across arbitrary search spaces. It serves as a standalone ZC proxy with strong data efficiency, robustness, and cross-space consistency. Extensive evaluations across diverse NAS benchmarks demonstrate TG-NAS's superior rank correlation and generalizability compared to existing proxies. Additionally, it improves search efficiency by up to 300x and discovers architectures achieving 93.75% CIFAR-10 accuracy on NAS-Bench-201 and 74.9% ImageNet top-1 accuracy on the DARTS space, establishing TG-NAS as a promising foundation for efficient, generalizable NAS.
title TG-NAS: Generalizable Zero-Cost Proxies with Operator Description Embedding and Graph Learning for Efficient Neural Architecture Search
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00271