Papers › Guided Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search With Efficient Performance Estimation

Guided Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search With Efficient Performance Estimation

22 Jul 2022arXiv:2208.06475archive 2025-07-28

Vasco Lopes, Miguel Santos, Bruno Degardin, Luís A. Alexandre

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods have been successfully applied to image tasks with excellent results. However, NAS methods are often complex and tend to converge to local minima as soon as generated architectures seem to yield good results. This paper proposes GEA, a novel approach for guided NAS. GEA guides the evolution by exploring the search space by generating and evaluating several architectures in each generation at initialisation stage using a zero-proxy estimator, where only the highest-scoring architecture is trained and kept for the next generation. Subsequently, GEA continuously extracts knowledge about the search space without increased complexity by generating several off-springs from an existing architecture at each generation. More, GEA forces exploitation of the most performant architectures by descendant generation while simultaneously driving exploration through parent mutation and favouring younger architectures to the detriment of older ones. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and extensive ablation studies evaluate the importance of different parameters. Results show that GEA achieves state-of-the-art results on all data sets of NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201 and TransNAS-Bench-101 benchmarks.

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Tasks

Neural Architecture Search

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, CIFAR-10 GAE Accuracy (Test) 93.99 #19 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, CIFAR-10 GAE Accuracy (Val) 91.26 #19 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, CIFAR-100 GAE Accuracy (Test) 72.36 #17 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, CIFAR-100 GAE Accuracy (Val) 72.62 #17 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 GEA Accuracy (Test) 46.04 #21 of 49 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.

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