Accel-NASBench: Sustainable Benchmarking for Accelerator-Aware NAS
This addresses the challenge of high computational costs in NAS for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NAS benchmarking efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of unrealistic evaluations in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) benchmarks by introducing a technique to construct realistic benchmarks with reduced cost, resulting in an open-source bi-objective benchmark for ImageNet2012 and on-device accelerator performance that enables zero-cost search for state-of-the-art hardware-aware models.
One of the primary challenges impeding the progress of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is its extensive reliance on exorbitant computational resources. NAS benchmarks aim to simulate runs of NAS experiments at zero cost, remediating the need for extensive compute. However, existing NAS benchmarks use synthetic datasets and model proxies that make simplified assumptions about the characteristics of these datasets and models, leading to unrealistic evaluations. We present a technique that allows searching for training proxies that reduce the cost of benchmark construction by significant margins, making it possible to construct realistic NAS benchmarks for large-scale datasets. Using this technique, we construct an open-source bi-objective NAS benchmark for the ImageNet2012 dataset combined with the on-device performance of accelerators, including GPUs, TPUs, and FPGAs. Through extensive experimentation with various NAS optimizers and hardware platforms, we show that the benchmark is accurate and allows searching for state-of-the-art hardware-aware models at zero cost.