Papers › ParZC: Parametric Zero-Cost Proxies for Efficient NAS

ParZC: Parametric Zero-Cost Proxies for Efficient NAS

3 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.02105archive 2025-07-28

Peijie Dong, Lujun Li, Xinglin Pan, Zimian Wei, Xiang Liu, Qiang Wang, Xiaowen Chu

Recent advancements in Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) highlight the efficacy of zero-cost proxies in various NAS benchmarks. Several studies propose the automated design of zero-cost proxies to achieve SOTA performance but require tedious searching progress. Furthermore, we identify a critical issue with current zero-cost proxies: they aggregate node-wise zero-cost statistics without considering the fact that not all nodes in a neural network equally impact performance estimation. Our observations reveal that node-wise zero-cost statistics significantly vary in their contributions to performance, with each node exhibiting a degree of uncertainty. Based on this insight, we introduce a novel method called Parametric Zero-Cost Proxies (ParZC) framework to enhance the adaptability of zero-cost proxies through parameterization. To address the node indiscrimination, we propose a Mixer Architecture with Bayesian Network (MABN) to explore the node-wise zero-cost statistics and estimate node-specific uncertainty. Moreover, we propose DiffKendall as a loss function to directly optimize Kendall's Tau coefficient in a differentiable manner so that our ParZC can better handle the discrepancies in ranking architectures. Comprehensive experiments on NAS-Bench-101, 201, and NDS demonstrate the superiority of our proposed ParZC compared to existing zero-shot NAS methods. Additionally, we demonstrate the versatility and adaptability of ParZC by transferring it to the Vision Transformer search space.

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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, ImageNet-16-120 ParZC Accuracy (Test) 46.34 #15 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 ParZC Accuracy (Val) 46.37 #15 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

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerVision Transformer

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