Searching on a Budget: HW-NAS with 10 Latency Probes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Capuano, Francesco, Tiboni, Gabriele, Cavagnero, Niccolò, Averta, Giuseppe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Capuano, Francesco
Tiboni, Gabriele
Cavagnero, Niccolò
Averta, Giuseppe
author_facet Capuano, Francesco
Tiboni, Gabriele
Cavagnero, Niccolò
Averta, Giuseppe
contents Existing hardware-aware NAS (HW-NAS) methods typically assume access to precise information circa the target device, either via analytical approximations of the post-compilation latency model, or through learned latency predictors. Such approximate approaches risk introducing estimation errors that may prove detrimental in risk-sensitive applications. In this work, we propose a two-stage HW-NAS framework, in which we first learn an architecture controller on a distribution of synthetic devices, and then directly deploy the controller on a target device. At test-time, our network controller deploys directly to the target device without relying on any pre-collected information, and only exploits direct interactions. In particular, the pre-training phase on synthetic devices enables the controller to design an architecture for the target device by interacting with it through a small number of high-fidelity latency measurements. To guarantee accessibility of our method, we only train our controller with training-free accuracy proxies, allowing us to scale the meta-training phase without incurring the overhead of full network training. We benchmark on HW-NATS-Bench, demonstrating that our method generalizes to unseen devices and searches for latency-efficient architectures by in-context adaptation using only a few real-world latency evaluations at test-time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00663
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Searching on a Budget: HW-NAS with 10 Latency Probes
Capuano, Francesco
Tiboni, Gabriele
Cavagnero, Niccolò
Averta, Giuseppe
Machine Learning
Existing hardware-aware NAS (HW-NAS) methods typically assume access to precise information circa the target device, either via analytical approximations of the post-compilation latency model, or through learned latency predictors. Such approximate approaches risk introducing estimation errors that may prove detrimental in risk-sensitive applications. In this work, we propose a two-stage HW-NAS framework, in which we first learn an architecture controller on a distribution of synthetic devices, and then directly deploy the controller on a target device. At test-time, our network controller deploys directly to the target device without relying on any pre-collected information, and only exploits direct interactions. In particular, the pre-training phase on synthetic devices enables the controller to design an architecture for the target device by interacting with it through a small number of high-fidelity latency measurements. To guarantee accessibility of our method, we only train our controller with training-free accuracy proxies, allowing us to scale the meta-training phase without incurring the overhead of full network training. We benchmark on HW-NATS-Bench, demonstrating that our method generalizes to unseen devices and searches for latency-efficient architectures by in-context adaptation using only a few real-world latency evaluations at test-time.
title Searching on a Budget: HW-NAS with 10 Latency Probes
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00663