Papers › AttentiveNAS: Improving Neural Architecture Search via Attentive Sampling

AttentiveNAS: Improving Neural Architecture Search via Attentive Sampling

18 Nov 2020CVPR 2021 1arXiv:2011.09011archive 2025-07-28

Dilin Wang, Meng Li, Chengyue Gong, Vikas Chandra

Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown great promise in designing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models that are both accurate and efficient. Recently, two-stage NAS, e.g. BigNAS, decouples the model training and searching process and achieves remarkable search efficiency and accuracy. Two-stage NAS requires sampling from the search space during training, which directly impacts the accuracy of the final searched models. While uniform sampling has been widely used for its simplicity, it is agnostic of the model performance Pareto front, which is the main focus in the search process, and thus, misses opportunities to further improve the model accuracy. In this work, we propose AttentiveNAS that focuses on improving the sampling strategy to achieve better performance Pareto. We also propose algorithms to efficiently and effectively identify the networks on the Pareto during training. Without extra re-training or post-processing, we can simultaneously obtain a large number of networks across a wide range of FLOPs. Our discovered model family, AttentiveNAS models, achieves top-1 accuracy from 77.3% to 80.7% on ImageNet, and outperforms SOTA models, including BigNAS and Once-for-All networks. We also achieve ImageNet accuracy of 80.1% with only 491 MFLOPs. Our training code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/AttentiveNAS.

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Code

facebookresearch/AttentiveNAS officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
facebookresearch/AlphaNet mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Neural Architecture Search

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A5 Accuracy 80.1 #22 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A5 MACs 491M #22 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A5 Top-1 Error Rate 19.9 #22 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A4 Accuracy 79.8 #25 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A4 MACs 444M #25 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A4 Top-1 Error Rate 20.2 #25 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A3 Accuracy 79.1 #36 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A3 MACs 357M #36 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A3 Top-1 Error Rate 20.9 #36 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A2 Accuracy 78.8 #42 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A2 MACs 317M #42 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A2 Top-1 Error Rate 21.2 #42 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A1 Accuracy 78.4 #48 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A1 MACs 279M #48 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A1 Top-1 Error Rate 21.6 #48 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A0 Accuracy 77.3 #66 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A0 MACs 203M #66 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet AttentiveNAS-A0 Top-1 Error Rate 22.7 #66 of 135 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Entropy RegularizationLSTMNeural Architecture SearchPPOSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh Activation

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