LLMatic: Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Models and Quality Diversity Optimization
This addresses the problem of efficient neural architecture search for machine learning researchers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles neural architecture search by combining large language models with quality-diversity optimization, resulting in LLMatic, which produces competitive networks on CIFAR-10 and NAS-bench-201 while evaluating only 2,000 candidates.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of accomplishing a broad spectrum of tasks. Their abilities span numerous areas, and one area where they have made a significant impact is in the domain of code generation. Here, we propose using the coding abilities of LLMs to introduce meaningful variations to code defining neural networks. Meanwhile, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are known to discover diverse and robust solutions. By merging the code-generating abilities of LLMs with the diversity and robustness of QD solutions, we introduce \texttt{LLMatic}, a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm. While LLMs struggle to conduct NAS directly through prompts, \texttt{LLMatic} uses a procedural approach, leveraging QD for prompts and network architecture to create diverse and high-performing networks. We test \texttt{LLMatic} on the CIFAR-10 and NAS-bench-201 benchmarks, demonstrating that it can produce competitive networks while evaluating just $2,000$ candidates, even without prior knowledge of the benchmark domain or exposure to any previous top-performing models for the benchmark. The open-sourced code is available in \url{https://github.com/umair-nasir14/LLMatic}.