Training-Free Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is cutting-edge technology in the machine learning community. NAS Without Training (NASWOT) recently has been proposed to tackle the high demand of computational resources in NAS by leveraging some indicators to predict the performance of architectures before training. The advantage of these indicators is that they do not require any training. Thus, NASWOT reduces the searching time and computational cost significantly. However, NASWOT only considers high-performing networks which does not guarantee a fast inference speed on hardware devices. In this paper, we propose a multi objectives reward function, which considers the network's latency and the predicted performance, and incorporate it into the Reinforcement Learning approach to search for the best networks with low latency. Unlike other methods, which use FLOPs to measure the latency that does not reflect the actual latency, we obtain the network's latency from the hardware NAS bench. We conduct extensive experiments on NAS-Bench-201 using CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-16-120 datasets, and show that the proposed method is capable of generating the best network under latency constrained without training subnetworks.