{"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/swap-nas-sample-wise-activation-patterns-for","title":"SWAP-NAS: Sample-Wise Activation Patterns for Ultra-fast NAS","arxiv_id":"2403.04161","date":"2024-03-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yameng Peng","Andy Song","Haytham M. Fayek","Vic Ciesielski","Xiaojun Chang"],"abstract":"Training-free metrics (a.k.a. zero-cost proxies) are widely used to avoid resource-intensive neural network training, especially in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Recent studies show that existing training-free metrics have several limitations, such as limited correlation and poor generalisation across different search spaces and tasks. Hence, we propose Sample-Wise Activation Patterns and its derivative, SWAP-Score, a novel high-performance training-free metric. It measures the expressivity of networks over a batch of input samples. The SWAP-Score is strongly correlated with ground-truth performance across various search spaces and tasks, outperforming 15 existing training-free metrics on NAS-Bench-101/201/301 and TransNAS-Bench-101. The SWAP-Score can be further enhanced by regularisation, which leads to even higher correlations in cell-based search space and enables model size control during the search. For example, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between regularised SWAP-Score and CIFAR-100 validation accuracies on NAS-Bench-201 networks is 0.90, significantly higher than 0.80 from the second-best metric, NWOT. When integrated with an evolutionary algorithm for NAS, our SWAP-NAS achieves competitive performance on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet in approximately 6 minutes and 9 minutes of GPU time respectively.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04161v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.04161v5.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":"swap-nas-sample-wise-activation-patterns-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/pym1024/swap","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"architecture-search","task_name":"Neural Architecture Search"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2403.04161","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}