Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can automatically design promising neural architectures without artificial experience. Though itachievesgreat success, prohibitively high search cost is required to find a high-performance architecture, whichblocksitspractical implementation.

Time-intensive performance evaluations significantly impede progress in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To address this, neural predictors leverage surrogate models trained on proxy datasets, allowing for direct performance predictions for new architectures. However, these predictors often exhibit poor generalization due to their limited ability to capture intricate relationships among various architectures. In this paper, we propose HyperNAS, a novel neural predictor paradigm for enhancing architecture representation learning. HyperNAS consists of two primary components: a global encoding scheme and a shared hypernetwork. The global encoding scheme is devised to capture the comprehensive macro-structure information, while the shared hypernetwork serves as an auxiliary task to enhance the investigation of inter-architecture patterns. To ensure training stability, we further develop a dynamic adaptive multi-task loss to facilitate personalized exploration on the Pareto front. Extensive experiments across five representative search spaces, including ViTs, demonstrate the advantages of HyperNAS, particularly in few-shot scenarios. For instance, HyperNAS strikes new state-of-the-art results, with 97.60\% top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 82.4\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, using at least 5.0$\times$ fewer samples.

Aerial robotics for transporting suspended payloads as the form of freely-floating manipulator are growing great interest in recent years. However, the prior information of the payload, such as the mass, is always hard to obtain accurately in practice. The force/torque caused by payload and residual dynamics will introduce unmodeled perturbations to the system, which negatively affects the closed-loop performance. Different from estimation-like methods, this paper proposes Neural Predictor, a learning-based approach to model force/torque caused by payload and residual dynamics as a dynamical system. It results a hybrid model including both the first-principles dynamics and the learned dynamics. This hybrid model is then integrated into a MPC framework to improve closed-loop performance. Effectiveness of proposed framework is verified extensively in both numerical simulations and real-world flight experiments. The results indicate that our approach can capture force/torque caused by payload and residual dynamics accurately, respond quickly to the changes of them and improve the closed-loop performance significantly. In particular, Neural Predictor outperforms a state-of-the-art learning-based estimator and has reduced the force and torque estimation errors by up to 66.15% and 33.33% while using less samples.

Deep neural network (DNN) hardware (HW) accelerators have achieved great success in improving DNNs' performance and efficiency. One key reason is dataflow in executing a DNN layer, including on-chip data partitioning, computation parallelism, and scheduling policy, which have large impacts on latency and energy consumption. Unlike prior works that required considerable efforts from HW engineers to design suitable dataflows for different DNNs, this work proposes an efficient data-centric approach, named Dataflow Code Propagation (DCP), to automatically find the optimal dataflow for DNN layers in seconds without human effort. It has several attractive benefits that prior arts do not have. (i) We translate the HW dataflow configuration into a code representation in a unified dataflow coding space, which can be optimized by backpropagating gradients given a DNN layer or network. (ii) DCP learns a neural predictor to efficiently update the dataflow codes towards the desired gradient directions to minimize various optimization objectives e.g., latency and energy. (iii) It can be easily generalized to unseen HW configurations in a zero-shot or few-shot learning manner. For example, without using additional training data, DCP surpasses the GAMMA method that performs a full search using thousands of samples. Extensive experiments on several representative models such as MobileNet, ResNet, and ViT show that DCP outperforms its counterparts in various settings.

Neural predictors are effective in boosting the time-consuming performance evaluation stage in neural architecture search (NAS), owing to their direct estimation of unseen architectures. Despite the effectiveness, training a powerful neural predictor with fewer annotated architectures remains a huge challenge. In this paper, we propose a context-aware neural predictor (CAP) which only needs a few annotated architectures for training based on the contextual information from the architectures. Specifically, the input architectures are encoded into graphs and the predictor infers the contextual structure around the nodes inside each graph. Then, enhanced by the proposed context-aware self-supervised task, the pre-trained predictor can obtain expressive and generalizable representations of architectures. Therefore, only a few annotated architectures are sufficient for training. Experimental results in different search spaces demonstrate the superior performance of CAP compared with state-of-the-art neural predictors. In particular, CAP can rank architectures precisely at the budget of only 172 annotated architectures in NAS-Bench-101. Moreover, CAP can help find promising architectures in both NAS-Bench-101 and DARTS search spaces on the CIFAR-10 dataset, serving as a useful navigator for NAS to explore the search space efficiently.

Modern neural trajectory predictors in autonomous driving are developed using imitation learning (IL) from driving logs. Although IL benefits from its ability to glean nuanced and multi-modal human driving behaviors from large datasets, the resulting predictors often struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios and with traffic rule compliance. On the other hand, classical rule-based predictors, by design, can predict traffic rule satisfying behaviors while being robust to OOD scenarios, but these predictors fail to capture nuances in agent-to-agent interactions and human driver's intent. In this paper, we present RuleFuser, a posterior-net inspired evidential framework that combines neural predictors with classical rule-based predictors to draw on the complementary benefits of both, thereby striking a balance between performance and traffic rule compliance. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated on the real-world nuPlan dataset where RuleFuser leverages the higher performance of the neural predictor in in-distribution (ID) scenarios and the higher safety offered by the rule-based predictor in OOD scenarios.

Human object recognition exhibits remarkable resilience in cluttered and dynamic visual environments. In contrast, despite their unparalleled performance across numerous visual tasks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) remain far less robust than humans, showing, for example, a surprising susceptibility to adversarial attacks involving image perturbations that are (almost) imperceptible to humans. Human object recognition likely owes its robustness, in part, to the increasingly resilient representations that emerge along the hierarchy of the ventral visual cortex. Here we show that DNNs, when guided by neural representations from a hierarchical sequence of regions in the human ventral visual stream, display increasing robustness to adversarial attacks. These neural-guided models also exhibit a gradual shift towards more human-like decision-making patterns and develop hierarchically smoother decision surfaces. Importantly, the resulting representational spaces differ in important ways from those produced by conventional smoothing methods, suggesting that such neural-guidance may provide previously unexplored robustness solutions. Our findings support the gradual emergence of human robustness along the ventral visual hierarchy and suggest that the key to DNN robustness may lie in increasing emulation of the human brain.

Quantum kernels hold great promise for offering computational advantages over classical learners, with the effectiveness of these kernels closely tied to the design of the quantum feature map. However, the challenge of designing effective quantum feature maps for real-world datasets, particularly in the absence of sufficient prior information, remains a significant obstacle. In this study, we present a data-driven approach that automates the design of problem-specific quantum feature maps. Our approach leverages feature-selection techniques to handle high-dimensional data on near-term quantum machines with limited qubits, and incorporates a deep neural predictor to efficiently evaluate the performance of various candidate quantum kernels. Through extensive numerical simulations on different datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposal over prior methods, especially for the capability of eliminating the kernel concentration issue and identifying the feature map with prediction advantages. Our work not only unlocks the potential of quantum kernels for enhancing real-world tasks but also highlights the substantial role of deep learning in advancing quantum machine learning.

Neural predictors have shown great potential in the evaluation process of neural architecture search (NAS). However, current predictor-based approaches overlook the fact that training a predictor necessitates a considerable number of trained neural networks as the labeled training set, which is costly to obtain. Therefore, the critical issue in utilizing predictors for NAS is to train a high-performance predictor using as few trained neural networks as possible. Although some methods attempt to address this problem through unsupervised learning, they often result in inaccurate predictions. We argue that the unsupervised tasks intended for the common graph data are too challenging for neural networks, causing unsupervised training to be susceptible to performance crashes in NAS. To address this issue, we propose a Curricumum-guided Contrastive Learning framework for neural Predictor (DCLP). Our method simplifies the contrastive task by designing a novel curriculum to enhance the stability of unlabeled training data distribution during contrastive training. Specifically, we propose a scheduler that ranks the training data according to the contrastive difficulty of each data and then inputs them to the contrastive learner in order. This approach concentrates the training data distribution and makes contrastive training more efficient. By using our method, the contrastive learner incrementally learns feature representations via unsupervised data on a smooth learning curve, avoiding performance crashes that may occur with excessively variable training data distributions. We experimentally demonstrate that DCLP has high accuracy and efficiency compared with existing predictors, and shows promising potential to discover superior architectures in various search spaces when combined with search strategies. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Zhengsh123/DCLP.