Performing Neural Architecture Search Without Gradients

One of the most crucial concerns in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is the amount of resources and time required for the search. In this paper we address the problem of training-free (or zero-shot) search. We propose a generalized architecture search framework called enhanced training-free neural architecture search (ETE-NAS). It ranks architectures according to a user defined combination of zero-shot ranking functions. We instantiate it with metrics based on neural network Gaussian process (NNGP) kernel and ReLU regions division. This allows much faster search on a single GPU than other training-free approaches without sacrificing accuracy or inducing instability. Code is available at https://github.com/Rufaim/ETENAS