When Training-Free NAS Meets Vision Transformer: A Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhou, Qiqi, Zhu, Yichen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Zhou, Qiqi
Zhu, Yichen
author_facet Zhou, Qiqi
Zhu, Yichen
contents This paper investigates the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) to search vision transformers without training. In contrast with the previous observation that NTK-based metrics can effectively predict CNNs performance at initialization, we empirically show their inefficacy in the ViT search space. We hypothesize that the fundamental feature learning preference within ViT contributes to the ineffectiveness of applying NTK to NAS for ViT. We both theoretically and empirically validate that NTK essentially estimates the ability of neural networks that learn low-frequency signals, completely ignoring the impact of high-frequency signals in feature learning. To address this limitation, we propose a new method called ViNTK that generalizes the standard NTK to the high-frequency domain by integrating the Fourier features from inputs. Experiments with multiple ViT search spaces on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks show that our method can significantly speed up search costs over prior state-of-the-art NAS for ViT while maintaining similar performance on searched architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_04536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Training-Free NAS Meets Vision Transformer: A Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective
Zhou, Qiqi
Zhu, Yichen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
This paper investigates the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) to search vision transformers without training. In contrast with the previous observation that NTK-based metrics can effectively predict CNNs performance at initialization, we empirically show their inefficacy in the ViT search space. We hypothesize that the fundamental feature learning preference within ViT contributes to the ineffectiveness of applying NTK to NAS for ViT. We both theoretically and empirically validate that NTK essentially estimates the ability of neural networks that learn low-frequency signals, completely ignoring the impact of high-frequency signals in feature learning. To address this limitation, we propose a new method called ViNTK that generalizes the standard NTK to the high-frequency domain by integrating the Fourier features from inputs. Experiments with multiple ViT search spaces on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks show that our method can significantly speed up search costs over prior state-of-the-art NAS for ViT while maintaining similar performance on searched architectures.
title When Training-Free NAS Meets Vision Transformer: A Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04536