MOTE-NAS: Multi-Objective Training-based Estimate for Efficient Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods seek effective optimization toward performance metrics regarding model accuracy and generalization while facing challenges regarding search costs and GPU resources. Recent Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) NAS methods achieve remarkable search efficiency based on a training-free model estimate; however, they overlook the non-convex nature of the DNNs in the search process. In this paper, we develop Multi-Objective Training-based Estimate (MOTE) for efficient NAS, retaining search effectiveness and achieving the new state-of-the-art in the accuracy and cost trade-off. To improve NTK and inspired by the Training Speed Estimation (TSE) method, MOTE is designed to model the actual performance of DNNs from macro to micro perspective by draw loss landscape and convergence speed simultaneously. Using two reduction strategies, the MOTE is generated based on a reduced architecture and a reduced dataset. Inspired by evolutionary search, our iterative ranking-based, coarse-to-fine architecture search is highly effective. Experiments on NASBench-201 show MOTE-NAS achieves 94.32% accuracy on CIFAR-10, 72.81% on CIFAR-100, and 46.38% on ImageNet-16-120, outperforming NTK-based NAS approaches. An evaluation-free (EF) version of MOTE-NAS delivers high efficiency in only 5 minutes, delivering a model more accurate than KNAS.