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DetNAS: Backbone Search for Object Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Object detectors are usually equipped with backbone networks designed for image classification. It might be sub-optimal because of the gap between the tasks of image classification and object detection. In this work, we present DetNAS to use Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for the design of better backbones for object detection. It is non-trivial because detection training typically needs ImageNetpre-training while NAS systems require accuracies on the target detection task as supervisory signals. Based on the technique of one-shot supernet, which contains all possible networks in the search space, we propose a framework for backbone search on object detection.


Task-Adaptive Neural Network Search with Meta-Contrastive Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Most conventional Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches are limited in that they only generate architectures without searching for the optimal parameters. While some NAS methods handle this issue by utilizing a supernet trained on a large-scale dataset such as ImageNet, they may be suboptimal if the target tasks are highly dissimilar from the dataset the supernet is trained on. To address such limitations, we introduce a novel problem of Neural Network Search (NNS), whose goal is to search for the optimal pretrained network for a novel dataset and constraints (e.g.


BatchQuant: Quantized-for-all Architecture Search with Robust Quantizer

Neural Information Processing Systems

As the applications of deep learning models on edge devices increase at an accelerating pace, fast adaptation to various scenarios with varying resource constraints has become a crucial aspect of model deployment. As a result, model optimization strategies with adaptive configuration are becoming increasingly popular. While single-shot quantized neural architecture search enjoys flexibility in both model architecture and quantization policy, the combined search space comes with many challenges, including instability when training the weight-sharing supernet and difficulty in navigating the exponentially growing search space. Existing methods tend to either limit the architecture search space to a small set of options or limit the quantization policy search space to fixed precision policies. To this end, we propose BatchQuant, a robust quantizer formulation that allows fast and stable training of a compact, single-shot, mixed-precision, weight-sharing supernet. We employ BatchQuant to train a compact supernet (offering over $10^{76}$ quantized subnets) within substantially fewer GPU hours than previous methods. Our approach, Quantized-for-all (QFA), is the first to seamlessly extend one-shot weight-sharing NAS supernet to support subnets with arbitrary ultra-low bitwidth mixed-precision quantization policies without retraining. QFA opens up new possibilities in joint hardware-aware neural architecture search and quantization.


BioArc: Discovering Optimal Neural Architectures for Biological Foundation Models

Fang, Yi, Xu, Haoran, Han, Jiaxin, Ding, Sirui, Wang, Yizhi, Wang, Yue, Wang, Xuan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Foundation models have revolutionized various fields such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). While efforts have been made to transfer the success of the foundation models in general AI domains to biology, existing works focus on directly adopting the existing foundation model architectures from general machine learning domains without a systematic design considering the unique physicochemical and structural properties of each biological data modality. This leads to suboptimal performance, as these repurposed architectures struggle to capture the long-range dependencies, sparse information, and complex underlying ``grammars'' inherent to biological data. To address this gap, we introduce BioArc, a novel framework designed to move beyond intuition-driven architecture design towards principled, automated architecture discovery for biological foundation models. Leveraging Neural Architecture Search (NAS), BioArc systematically explores a vast architecture design space, evaluating architectures across multiple biological modalities while rigorously analyzing the interplay between architecture, tokenization, and training strategies. This large-scale analysis identifies novel, high-performance architectures, allowing us to distill a set of empirical design principles to guide future model development. Furthermore, to make the best of this set of discovered principled architectures, we propose and compare several architecture prediction methods that effectively and efficiently predict optimal architectures for new biological tasks. Overall, our work provides a foundational resource and a principled methodology to guide the creation of the next generation of task-specific and foundation models for biology.


AutoTailor: Automatic and Efficient Adaptive Model Deployment for Diverse Edge Devices

Liu, Mengyang, Lu, Chenyu, Tian, Haodong, Dong, Fang, Zhou, Ruiting, Wang, Wei, Shen, Dian, Li, Guangtong, Wan, Ye, Li, Li

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

On-device machine learning (ML) has become a fundamental component of emerging mobile applications. Adaptive model deployment delivers efficient inference for heterogeneous device capabilities and performance requirements through customizing neural architectures. SuperNet-based approaches offer a promising solution by generating a large number of model variants from a pre-trained ML model. However, applying SuperNet in existing frameworks suffers from tedious model-aware development and time-consuming hardware-aware profiling, which limits their practical adoption. We present AutoTailor, the first framework to enable automated, end-to-end SuperNet-based adaptive model deployment for edge devices. Unlike manual SuperNet construction, AutoTailor employs a computation graph-guided compilation approach to automatically transform user-provided ML models into SuperNets. To support efficient specialization, AutoTailor incorporates learning-free latency and accuracy predictors, enabling low-cost yet accurate performance prediction. Our extended evaluations demonstrate that AutoTailor reduces the lines of code for SuperNet construction by 11--27$\times$, decreases hardware-aware profiling costs by at least 11$\times$, and achieves up to 15.60\% absolute accuracy improvement and 60.03\% latency reduction compared to state-of-the-art approaches across diverse models and devices.


Evaluating Efficient Performance Estimators of Neural Architectures

Neural Information Processing Systems

Furthermore, the analysis framework proposed in our work could be utilized in future research to give a more comprehensive understanding of newly designed architecture performance estimators.