NEAR: A Training-Free Pre-Estimator of Machine Learning Model Performance

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Hauptverfasser: Husistein, Raphael T., Reiher, Markus, Eckhoff, Marco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Husistein, Raphael T.
Reiher, Markus
Eckhoff, Marco
author_facet Husistein, Raphael T.
Reiher, Markus
Eckhoff, Marco
contents Artificial neural networks have been shown to be state-of-the-art machine learning models in a wide variety of applications, including natural language processing and image recognition. However, building a performant neural network is a laborious task and requires substantial computing power. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) addresses this issue by an automatic selection of the optimal network from a set of potential candidates. While many NAS methods still require training of (some) neural networks, zero-cost proxies promise to identify the optimal network without training. In this work, we propose the zero-cost proxy \textit{Network Expressivity by Activation Rank} (NEAR). It is based on the effective rank of the pre- and post-activation matrix, i.e., the values of a neural network layer before and after applying its activation function. We demonstrate the cutting-edge correlation between this network score and the model accuracy on NAS-Bench-101 and NATS-Bench-SSS/TSS. In addition, we present a simple approach to estimate the optimal layer sizes in multi-layer perceptrons. Furthermore, we show that this score can be utilized to select hyperparameters such as the activation function and the neural network weight initialization scheme.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_08776
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NEAR: A Training-Free Pre-Estimator of Machine Learning Model Performance
Husistein, Raphael T.
Reiher, Markus
Eckhoff, Marco
Machine Learning
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Chemical Physics
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Artificial neural networks have been shown to be state-of-the-art machine learning models in a wide variety of applications, including natural language processing and image recognition. However, building a performant neural network is a laborious task and requires substantial computing power. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) addresses this issue by an automatic selection of the optimal network from a set of potential candidates. While many NAS methods still require training of (some) neural networks, zero-cost proxies promise to identify the optimal network without training. In this work, we propose the zero-cost proxy \textit{Network Expressivity by Activation Rank} (NEAR). It is based on the effective rank of the pre- and post-activation matrix, i.e., the values of a neural network layer before and after applying its activation function. We demonstrate the cutting-edge correlation between this network score and the model accuracy on NAS-Bench-101 and NATS-Bench-SSS/TSS. In addition, we present a simple approach to estimate the optimal layer sizes in multi-layer perceptrons. Furthermore, we show that this score can be utilized to select hyperparameters such as the activation function and the neural network weight initialization scheme.
title NEAR: A Training-Free Pre-Estimator of Machine Learning Model Performance
topic Machine Learning
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Chemical Physics
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08776