Multi-Predict: Few Shot Predictors For Efficient Neural Architecture
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Yash Akhauri Mohamed S. Abdelfattah
Many hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) methods have been
developed to optimize the topology of neural networks (NN) with the joint
objectives of higher accuracy and lower latency. Recently, both accuracy and
latency predictors have been used in NAS with great success, achieving high
sample efficiency and accurate modeling of hardware (HW) device latency
respectively. However, a new accuracy predictor needs to be trained for every
new NAS search space or NN task, and a new latency predictor needs to be
additionally trained for every new HW device. In this paper, we explore methods
to enable multi-task, multi-search-space, and multi-HW adaptation of accuracy
and latency predictors to reduce the cost of NAS. We introduce a novel
search-space independent NN encoding based on zero-cost proxies that achieves
sample-efficient prediction on multiple tasks and NAS search spaces, improving
the end-to-end sample efficiency of latency and accuracy predictors by over an
order of magnitude in multiple scenarios. For example, our NN encoding enables
multi-search-space transfer of latency predictors from NASBench-201 to FBNet
(and vice-versa) in under 85 HW measurements, a 400$\times$ improvement in
sample efficiency compared to a recent meta-learning approach. Our method also
improves the total sample efficiency of accuracy predictors by over an order of
magnitude. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for
multi-search-space and multi-task accuracy prediction on 28 NAS search spaces
and tasks.