{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/rbflex-nas-training-free-neural-architecture","title":"RBFleX-NAS: Training-Free Neural Architecture Search Using Radial Basis Function Kernel and Hyperparameter Detection","arxiv_id":"2503.22733","date":"2025-03-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tomomasa Yamasaki","Zhehui Wang","Tao Luo","Niangjun Chen","Bo wang"],"abstract":"Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an automated technique to design optimal neural network architectures for a specific workload. Conventionally, evaluating candidate networks in NAS involves extensive training, which requires significant time and computational resources. To address this, training-free NAS has been proposed to expedite network evaluation with minimal search time. However, state-of-the-art training-free NAS algorithms struggle to precisely distinguish well-performing networks from poorly-performing networks, resulting in inaccurate performance predictions and consequently sub-optimal top-1 network accuracy. Moreover, they are less effective in activation function exploration. To tackle the challenges, this paper proposes RBFleX-NAS, a novel training-free NAS framework that accounts for both activation outputs and input features of the last layer with a Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel. We also present a detection algorithm to identify optimal hyperparameters using the obtained activation outputs and input feature maps. We verify the efficacy of RBFleX-NAS over a variety of NAS benchmarks. RBFleX-NAS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art training-free NAS methods in terms of top-1 accuracy, achieving this with short search time in NAS-Bench-201 and NAS-Bench-SSS. In addition, it demonstrates higher Kendall correlation compared to layer-based training-free NAS algorithms. Furthermore, we propose NAFBee, a new activation design space that extends the activation type to encompass various commonly used functions. In this extended design space, RBFleX-NAS demonstrates its superiority by accurately identifying the best-performing network during activation function search, providing a significant advantage over other NAS algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22733v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22733v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"rbflex-nas-training-free-neural-architecture","repo_url":"https://github.com/Edge-AI-Acceleration-Lab/RBFleX-NAS","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"rbflex-nas-training-free-neural-architecture","repo_url":"https://github.com/tomomasayamasaki/RBFleX-NAS","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"architecture-search","task_name":"Neural Architecture Search"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}