Instructing the Architecture Search for Spatial-temporal Sequence Forecasting with LLM
This work addresses the challenge of time-consuming and knowledge-limited architecture search in spatial-temporal forecasting, offering a more efficient solution for researchers and practitioners in fields like traffic prediction or weather forecasting.
The paper tackles the problem of automating neural architecture design for spatial-temporal sequence forecasting by introducing a novel NAS method that leverages large language models (LLMs) with a multi-level enhancement mechanism, achieving competitive effectiveness and superior efficiency compared to existing methods.
Spatial-temporal sequence forecasting (STSF) is a long-standing research problem with widespread real-world applications. Neural architecture search (NAS), which automates the neural network design, has been shown effective in tackling the STSF problem. However, the existing NAS methods for STSF focus on generating architectures in a time-consuming data-driven fashion, which heavily limits their ability to use background knowledge and explore the complicated search trajectory. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable ability in decision-making with comprehensive internal world knowledge, but how it could benefit NAS for STSF remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel NAS method for STSF based on LLM. Instead of directly generate architectures with LLM, We inspire the LLM's capability with a multi-level enhancement mechanism. Specifically, on the step-level, we decompose the generation task into decision steps with powerful prompt engineering and inspire LLM to serve as instructor for architecture search based on its internal knowledge. On the instance-level, we utilize a one-step tuning framework to quickly evaluate the architecture instance and a memory bank to cumulate knowledge to improve LLM's search ability. On the task-level, we propose a two-stage architecture search, balancing the exploration stage and optimization stage, to reduce the possibility of being trapped in local optima. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve competitive effectiveness with superior efficiency against existing NAS methods for STSF.