Papers › Neural Architecture Search without Training
Neural Architecture Search without Training
Joseph Mellor, Jack Turner, Amos Storkey, Elliot J. Crowley
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at https://github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
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Code
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neural Architecture Search | NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 | NAS without training (N=10) | Accuracy (Test) | 38.33 | #39 of 49 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Neural Architecture Search | NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 | NAS without training (N=10) | Search time (s) | 1.7 | #39 of 49 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Neural Architecture Search | NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 | NAS without training (N=100) | Accuracy (Test) | 36.37 | #40 of 49 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Neural Architecture Search | NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 | NAS without training (N=100) | Search time (s) | 17.4 | #40 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.
Methods
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