Gabriel Cortês; Nuno Lourenço; Penousal Machado

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has driven innovations and created new opportunities across various sectors. However, leveraging domain-specific knowledge often requires automated tools to design and configure models effectively. In the case of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), researchers and practitioners usually resort to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches, which are resource- and time-intensive, requiring the training and evaluation of numerous candidate architectures. This raises sustainability concerns, particularly due to the high energy demands involved, creating a paradox: the pursuit of the most effective model can undermine sustainability goals. To mitigate this issue, zero-cost proxies have emerged as a promising alternative. These proxies estimate a model's performance without the need for full training, offering a more efficient approach. This paper addresses the challenges of model evaluation by automatically designing zero-cost proxies to assess DNNs efficiently. Our method begins with a randomly generated set of zero-cost proxies, which are evolved and tested using the NATS-Bench benchmark. We assess the proxies' effectiveness using both randomly sampled and stratified subsets of the search space, ensuring they can differentiate between low- and high-performing networks and enhance generalizability. Results show our method outperforms existing approaches on the stratified sampling strategy, achieving strong correlations with ground truth performance, including a Kendall correlation of 0.89 on CIFAR-10 and 0.77 on CIFAR-100 with NATS-Bench-SSS and a Kendall correlation of 0.78 on CIFAR-10 and 0.71 on CIFAR-100 with NATS-Bench-TSS.