NAS
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AutoCompress: Automated Hardware-Guided Model Compression
2026-11-05 16:53:48Sheldon Liang, Ali Taghibakhshi, Saurav Muralidharan, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Ashwath Aithal, Pavlo Molchanov, Nima TajbakhshAbstract
LLM pruning must preserve quality while meeting hardware- and workload-specific constraints on latency, throughput, and memory. Existing pruning workflows often target parameter counts, requiring practitioners to manually select model sizes that meet latency, throughput, and GPU memory limits. However, parameter count alone does not predict these metrics, which depend on the model architecture, workload, hardware, and serving engine. We introduce AutoCompress, a hardware-guided compression framework that directly incorporates such constraints into differentiable architecture search. AutoCompress jointly optimizes global and per-layer structure to produce heterogeneous architectures, guided by serving-engine cost models validated against end-to-end latency, throughput, and memory measurements. We evaluate AutoCompress on long-context local coding, batched datacenter serving, and latency-sensitive in-game interaction. Compared to the state-of-the-art Minitron pruning framework, AutoCompress improves average accuracy across eight benchmarks by 6.57, 2.35, and 0.57 percentage points on RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and H100, respectively. AutoCompress also compresses Nemotron 3.5 Super from 120B to 74B parameters for single-B200 BF16 serving at 128K context, retaining 95% of its mean benchmark score.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08290
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MCUFlowNet: Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Optical Flow on Microcontrollers
2026-11-05 15:06:14Enmin Lin, Jona BeysensAbstract
Dense optical flow allows small drones to avoid obstacles. However, few dense optical flow networks are designed for microcontrollers (MCUs) with neural accelerators, whose on-chip SRAM limits the input resolution. We present PACE-NAS, a macro-to-micro neural architecture search framework that decouples memory from latency: a macro design fixes the backbone and its peak SRAM, and a micro design searches operators and depths to trade accuracy against compiler-estimated latency. We apply it to EdgeFlowNet on a Grove Vision AI V2 board (Ethos-U55), where profiling locates the peak SRAM at the full-resolution output head. Replacing transposed convolutions with bilinear upsampling and convolutions lowers the peak SRAM by 18%, and two lightweight context modules lower the endpoint error (EPE) without raising the peak. All searched subnets share this peak, so the search needs no memory constraint. We name the Pareto-optimal models MCUFlowNet; the fastest variant, MCUFlowNet-S, runs 1.76x faster than a retrained EdgeFlowNet at a 1.6% higher EPE and, in simulated forest flights at 2 m/s, reaches the goal without collision in 51.5% of trials, against 41.8%. PACE-NAS also applies to semantic segmentation, where a searched PIDNet-S variant runs 1.17x faster at similar accuracy. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08147
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uTHCD-C: A Corruption-Robustness Benchmark for Tamil Handwritten Character Recognition
2026-10-27 08:48:16Preethi S, Meeradevi T, Arun Prakash AAbstract
Evaluation of Tamil handwritten character recognition (HCR) has largely focused on clean test images, and a standardized multi-corruption robustness benchmark for isolated Tamil HCR has not been established. We introduce uTHCD-C, a corruption-robustness benchmark based on the unconstrained Tamil Handwritten Character Database (uTHCD). The benchmark defines ten corruption types, including a handwriting-specific stroke-thinning corruption, at five severity levels. We evaluate nine convolutional and transformer-based architectures using five-fold stratified cross-validation and writer-independent testing. Robustness is quantified using mean Corruption Error (mCE), normalized against a VGG16-BN reference. We additionally compare parameter count, computational complexity, and inference throughput to characterize the computational requirements of the evaluated architectures. The results establish comparative robustness baselines for Tamil HCR, revealing substantial differences across architectures: ConvNeXt and Swin achieve the lowest mCE values (0.75 and 0.83, respectively), whereas ShuffleNet and MnasNet exhibit higher values (1.55 and 1.85, respectively). The accompanying efficiency measurements characterize the trade-offs between corruption robustness and computational requirements. By providing standardized corruption configurations, evaluation protocols, and comparative results, uTHCD-C establishes a reproducible basis for future research on robust and computationally efficient Tamil HCR.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36850
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MOSHO: A Native Discrete Shark-Inspired Metaheuristic for Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search
2026-10-23 22:56:01Nazim Abdeerhmane Aouni, Zakaria Soualah Mohammed, Maroua Ogab, Nour El Imane Elbar, Rayane Rahmat Errahmane Smara, Billel Moussous, Adriane Anis Khaled, Malika Bessedik, Fatima Benbouzid Si Tayeb, Hadjer BenmezianeAbstract
Hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) requires jointly optimizing predictive accuracy and device-specific latency over discrete search spaces. While multi-objective swarm optimizers show promise, continuous formulations such as the Multi-Objective White Shark Optimizer (MOWSO) can suffer from quantization noise when rounded to integer-encoded architecture vectors. To address this limitation, we propose MOSHO (Multi-Objective Shark Hunting Optimization), a native discrete metaheuristic that replaces continuous motion equations with discrete architecture-editing operators. MOSHO integrates adaptive operator scheduling, energy-regulated restarts, and deferred crowding-distance truncation to enhance exploration and search efficiency. On the merged NAS-Bench-201/HW-NAS-Bench benchmark across 18 contexts, MOSHO achieves a median normalized hypervolume of 0.9987 and IGD+ of 0.0064, yielding Pareto fronts competitive with NSGA-II while reducing search runtime by 96.4% (0.64 s vs. 17.72 s). These results demonstrate that tailored discrete search mechanisms can enable swarm optimizers to achieve high-quality multi-objective solution quality with substantially lower search cost in hardware-aware NAS.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33358
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Searching with Sparse Histories: Cross-Task Architecture Search from Incomplete Search Logs and Zero-Cost Proxies
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Neural architecture search (NAS) is expensive, but cross-task transfer can reduce costs by reusing knowledge from previous tasks. However, existing methods struggle with sparse search histories and task-specific transfer failures. We propose a method, a risk-robust strategy that combines sparse source logs with zero-cost proxies through champion-based initialization and joint pairwise-ranker pretraining. On TransNAS-Bench-101, the proposal mitigates severe worst-case failures, reducing worst-10% ranks from 290 to 43 for Micro autoencoding and from 465 to 45 for Macro room layout. Across 13 cell-space targets, it outperforms a proxy-only ranker on 10 targets in both mean and worst-case performance, while maintaining competitive average performance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32179
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Automated Multi-Agent Organization Design: From Architecture Search to Organizational Learning
2026-10-20 02:47:52Shao-Jun Xia, Yuner Zhang, Huixin Zhang, Di Wang, Yifan Jiang, Liangxi LiuAbstract
Agentic system design is increasingly shifting from hand-crafted prompts and workflows toward automated search over agentic programs and interaction structures, with multi-agent systems receiving growing attention. Yet a central question remains unresolved: when does an automatically generated multi-agent structure exhibit a functionally meaningful division of responsibility? We argue that automated multi-agent design should move beyond searching for effective architectures toward identifying which responsibilities are functionally necessary, how they should be allocated, and when they should change. To explore this, we propose Automated Multi-Agent Organization Design (AMOD), which treats organization itself as a first-class design object, explicitly modeling how agent teams are composed, what functional responsibilities the agents assume, how they coordinate, and how collective decisions are made. We formulate AMOD as an execution-driven design loop. For each task, an automated designer instantiates an organization by assigning functional responsibilities and coordination rules to a set of agents. After execution, task outcomes, intermediate artifacts, and interaction traces are examined to identify which responsibilities may be missing, duplicated, or ineffective, and the organization is revised accordingly. We also propose testing discovered responsibilities by removing them, replacing them with generic roles, or changing their assignment under matched resource budgets, with complementary evaluations. AMOD provides a principled foundation for evidence-based and adaptive multi-agent organization design.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27531
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DTA-GT: Direction- and Topology-Aware Graph Transformer for Neural Network Representation Learning
2026-10-12 14:04:21Yuxiang Zeng, Kun Xie, Yang Wang, Jigang Wen, Xiaocan Li, Guangxing Zhang, Gaogang Xie, Jiannong CaoAbstract
Architecture attribute predictors reduce the cost of neural architecture search by estimating accuracy or latency from a small set of evaluated candidates. The key difficulty is that neural architectures are operation-labeled DAGs: edge direction defines computational flow, but existing predictors often treat direction as a local structural cue. We propose DTA-GT, a Direction- and Topology-Aware Graph Transformer based on encoder-wide directional consistency, which preserves directed computational semantics across node initialization, global spectral encoding, pairwise interaction, and feature update. DTA-GT realizes this principle with direction- and topology-aware node initialization, Magnetic Laplacian spectral encoding, direction-dual structural attention, and a Direction-Sensitive MoE-FFN. Across accuracy and latency prediction on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201, DTA-GT consistently outperforms representative sequence-, GNN-, Transformer-, and hybrid predictors under limited-budget settings. Ablations and Magnetic spectral controls show that the improvements come from coordinated direction-aware stages and edge-orientation-sensitive spectral information, while mechanistic diagnostics confirm that the modules exhibit the intended directional behavior. These results support encoder-wide directional consistency as an effective design principle for architecture DAG representation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16822
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Hardware-Assisted Multi-Stage Ransomware Detection with Adaptive Machine Learning
2026-10-11 22:17:25Salma Aboelmagd, Md. Rakibul Ahasan, Zhixin Pan, Abdulrahman Takiddin, Ziyu ShuAbstract
Ransomware is a fast-escalating privacy threat causing significant financial and data losses worldwide. As attacks grow more sophisticated, traditional static signatures and dynamic behavior analysis struggle to defend. In this paper, we propose an novel framework that couples software-level scanning with hardware-level microprocessor activity monitoring to achieve efficient ransomware detection and mitigation. The contributions are threefold: (1) we employ adversarial training to harden static analysis against obfuscation and leverage hardware-assisted monitoring for real-time detection; (2) we integrate neural architecture search (NAS) to automatically tailor models for stronger generalizability; and (3) We validate the proposed approach through extensive experiments, demonstrating substantially improved detection accuracy and reduced latency compared with existing methods. Moreover, it provides trace-level interpretability that explains the underlying decision process.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15951
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Efficient Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning-Based Neural Architecture Search
2026-10-08 23:03:32Khubaib Ahmed, Ahsan Adeel, Nasir Saleem, Kia Dashtipour, Ahsan Ulhaq, Amir HussainAbstract
Audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) improves speech intelligibility in noisy environments but often relies on computationally expensive models unsuitable for resource-constrained edge devices. This paper introduces a reinforcement learning-driven neural architecture search (RL-NAS) framework to discover compact, efficient AVSE architectures. The search space preserves temporal alignment between audio and visual streams, while a novel reward function jointly optimises speech enhancement performance, measured by SI-SNR improvement, and model compactness. Using proximal policy optimisation with constraint-aware action masking, the framework evaluates only 35 candidate architectures and identifies a model with 2.9 million parameters, compared with 22 million in the baseline. The proposed architecture achieves a 14.5 dB SI-SNR improvement, only 0.7 dB below the baseline, while reducing model size by approximately nine-fold. Evaluation on commercial mobile CPUs demonstrates a 4.3-fold reduction in real-time factor, supporting practical on-device deployment. Compared with random search, RL-NAS achieves 92% higher search efficiency. Architectural analysis reveals that shallower but wider temporal convolutional blocks and aggressive visual pathway pruning can maintain enhancement performance while substantially reducing computational requirements. These findings demonstrate the potential of reinforcement learning-guided architecture search for developing lightweight, efficient and deployable multimodal speech enhancement systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12796
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KITE: A Knowledge-Injected Temporal Encoder for Time-Series Event Forecasting
2026-10-08 21:35:42Jonas Petersen, Pratik Jawahar, Riccardo Maggioni, Gian-Alessandro Lombardi, Matteo Cozzi, Marek Gajewski, Federico Martelli, Camilla Mazzoleni, Philipp Christian PetersenAbstract
Forecasting rare, high-cost events in multivariate time-series systems is hard because their precursors are seldom observed, so a purely data-driven model has little to learn from. The engineers who run these systems, however, hold knowledge that precedes such events, information absent from the scarce labels. We call this a semantic prior and inject it into a self-supervised event forecaster through two switchable mechanisms, a covariate mechanism and an attention-bias mechanism, each the identity at its null, so one architecture serves every prior type with no per-dataset architecture search. A prior helps when it supplies information the observed window does not already contain: in a short context an informative prior beats no prior in-domain (pooled h-AUROC over the no-prior baseline: a periodicity clock +14%, p<0.001; a conservation residual +47% at a 0.25 label fraction), and a working prior transfers out-of-domain (+53%), substituting for feature transfer, while priors the window already recovers stay inert and the attention-bias mechanism shows no measurable gain. KITE is a switchable, attributable route to contextual conditioning, and a substrate for scaling toward cross-domain, pretrained time-series foundation world models that carry their governing structure explicitly.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12738
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vFedProtoQNAS: Prototype-Guided Personalized Quantum Neural Architecture Search for Virtual Federated Learning
2026-10-01 13:57:53Seok Bin Son, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Soohyun Park, Joongheon KimAbstract
Quantum federated learning (QFL) has emerged as a promising approach for collaboratively training compact quantum neural networks (QNNs) over distributed private data on resource-constrained devices. However, differences in device capabilities make a single shared QNN architecture unsuitable for all clients. While personalized quantum neural architecture search (QNAS) allows each client to select a device-specific QNN, averaging parameters across structurally different QNN architectures mixes semantically inconsistent circuit operations. To address this, prototype-guided personalized QNAS for virtual FL (vFedProtoQNAS) is proposed, where model parameters are never aggregated across clients and federated collaboration is achieved through class-wise prototype sharing. Each client independently searches and trains a client-specific QNN, computes class-wise local prototypes from latent representations, and refines them using global prototypes from the server as federated semantic anchors. Experiments demonstrate that vFedProtoQNAS improves accuracy by 3.70\% over FedAvg and enhances class-consistent representation alignment.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01718
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Rank-Reliable Teacher-Guided Fitness Approximation for Expensive Evolutionary Optimization: A TinyML Architecture Search Study
2026-09-24 21:03:03Soumen Garai, Suman SamuiAbstract
Expensive evolutionary search does not always need an exact fitness estimate for every candidate. It often needs a reliable answer to a simpler question: which candidate is better? We address this need through Teacher-Guided Learning NSGA-II (TGL-NSGA-II), a low-fidelity framework for constrained Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) neural architecture search. A pretrained teacher organizes samples into strata defined jointly by difficulty and class. Each candidate then undergoes KD-Lite, a short and capped knowledge-distillation procedure on a compact training set, before being scored on a separate stratified evaluation set. This teacher-guided score is fused with a Gaussian-process surrogate to select candidates for full evaluation. For a fixed candidate population, we analyse evaluation variance, score concentration, pairwise rank inversion, expected Kendall-$\tau$, first-front identification, and hypervolume perturbation. We also derive a variance-aware fusion weight and a capacity-adaptive distillation rule. On keyword spotting and bird-call classification, the measured Kendall-$\tau$ values are 0.74 and 0.62, exceeding the corresponding predicted lower bounds of 0.60 and 0.46. Joint stratification reduces proxy-score variance by 41% relative to random evaluation. Selective teacher mismatch, in contrast, increases differential bias and reduces Kendall-$\tau$ to 0.41. Under a constrained evaluation budget, TGL-NSGA-II achieves the largest mean hypervolume and smallest generational distance on keyword spotting, records the lowest mean false-positive rate on BirdCLEF, and runs 2.2x faster than full NSGA-II. These guarantees apply to population-level low-fidelity evaluation and do not establish convergence of the complete evolutionary trajectory.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30553
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RiPPLE: Cross-Space Performance Prediction from Early Training for Neural Architecture Search
2026-09-11 04:12:18Yifan Yang, Zhaoyan Wang, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Jiaojiao JiangAbstract
Neural architecture search (NAS) evaluates candidate networks, but fully training enough architectures to rank an entire space is expensive. Zero-cost proxies score architectures at initialization, yet their ranking quality varies across search spaces. Learned predictors reduce evaluation cost but typically require fully trained labels or partial-training features for individual candidates. We introduce $\textbf{RiPPLE}$, $\underline{\textbf{R}}$anking v$\underline{\textbf{i}}$a $\underline{\textbf{P}}$refix-$\underline{\textbf{P}}$ropagated $\underline{\textbf{L}}$abel $\underline{\textbf{E}}$xtrapolation, which treats partial training as a source of labels for a small coverage set of anchors. RiPPLE trains these anchors to an early prefix, extrapolates their learning curves to surrogate labels, and propagates the labels over label-free architecture features. The early-training signal remains a label on the anchors rather than a per-candidate feature. Feature, readout, and encoding rules are selected without held-out accuracy and reused across search spaces. We evaluate the method on twelve benchmark cells from four search-space families and on the larger DARTS space. The results examine ranking quality, label efficiency, architecture selection, and the roles of readout, coverage, and propagation. RiPPLE provides a whole-space ranking from a fractional anchor-training budget, with comparisons interpreted under their respective evaluation and cost protocols.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12418
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CoRA-NAS: Coarse Ranking and Anchor-Residual Refinement for Neural Architecture Search
2026-09-10 17:49:19Yifan Yang, Zhaoyan Wang, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Jiaojiao JiangAbstract
Zero-cost proxies rank architectures cheaply, but their reliability varies across search spaces. We introduce CoRA-NAS (COarse Ranking + Anchor-residual), a two-stage framework combining a static ranking prior with low-cost learning-curve refinement. CoRA-Rank aggregates capacity and structure-at-initialization proxies through an equal-weight log-rank consensus and a target-free consensus gate. CoRA-Refine samples anchors across this prior, extrapolates their early validation curves, and propagates a learned residual correction with an ExtraTrees model. The refinement uses approximately 1% of the cost of fully training the candidate set. Fully trained architecture-accuracy labels are not used to fit the ranker. One configuration is used across spaces, with space-specific architecture encodings. Across NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-101, TransNAS-Bench-101, and NATS-SSS, CoRA-Refine achieves mean Spearman correlations of 0.946, 0.715, 0.786, and 0.894, respectively. Its worst-space correlation of 0.715 is the highest among the compared methods. On NAS-Bench-201/CIFAR-100, its selected architecture reaches 73.32% accuracy, near the reported ground-truth best of 73.37%. On the pure size space, refinement recovers the static prior's shortfall relative to parameter count, while remaining tied with the strongest capacity proxies within noise. The resulting framework combines cross-space ranking robustness with low-cost architecture selection.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11884
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Generative Replay Mitigates Sample Starvation in Quantum Architecture Search
2026-09-10 08:45:37Akash Kundu, Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Sebastian Feld, Prayag TiwariAbstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) can automate quantum architecture search, but its scalability is limited when useful circuit trajectories become rare in the rapidly expanding search space. Existing replay mechanisms reuse observed transitions; the proposed learned model produces additional predicted one step transitions from real state-action seeds. Here we introduce GenQAS, a tensor network-guided RL framework that combines a fixed matrix product state warm-start with prioritized generative replay. A learned local transition model generates synthetic circuit transitions on demand and mixes them with real experience during Double Deep Q-Network updates. Under a random exploration analysis, near ground state circuits occupy a rapidly shrinking region of the accessible state space. We investigate whether real data anchored synthetic replay can improve the effective training signal in this regime. Across chemical Hamiltonian benchmarks from 6 to 12 qubits, GenQAS improves fixed-budget success probability and identifies compact circuits at competitive energy error. At 12 qubits, it improves final success probability by up to $7.0\times$ over passive replay. On a 15-qubit transverse field Ising model, GenQAS increases success probability from $12\%$ to $21\%$. In a noisy 6-qubit BeH$_2$ transfer experiment, generative replay reduces the steps to chemical accuracy by $92.7\%$. These results show that generative replay can mitigate sample starvation in quantum architecture search and support more resource efficient circuit discovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11248
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Efficient Leakage-Free Neural Architecture Search under Leave-One-Subject-Out Evaluation
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Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) evaluation estimates generalisation performance for subject-based classification but makes Neural Architecture Search (NAS) computationally expensive because a fully nested implementation requires N independent architecture searches and, assuming approximately linear training cost, scales as O(N^2). We propose a leakage-free, block-based approach that shares NAS runs across subjects. On the BioVid Heat Pain dataset, our approach increased the mean accuracy from 82.79% to 83.39% while reducing the number of parameters by up to 99.2%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09433
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NepScript Genesis: Neural Architecture Search for Handwritten Devanagari Digit Synthesis
2026-08-30 04:07:24Mausam Gurung, Prabin Neupane, Sajjan AcharyaAbstract
This paper introduces NepScript Genesis, a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework for automated Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) discovery, applied to conditional Devanagari handwritten digit synthesis. We compare five NAS strategies against a carefully constructed Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN) baseline (FID=332.28). Architecture selection utilizes a two-stage pipeline guided by a novel domain-aware evaluation metric (Enhanced Score). Results demonstrate that Adaptive Exploration achieves the optimal quality-efficiency trade-off, attaining an FID of 79.12 -- a 76.19% improvement over the baseline -- and the highest mode coverage among the NAS strategies (Recall=0.531) in under one GPU-hour. Furthermore, we demonstrate that incorporating script-specific structural heuristics into the search phase prevents early-stage mode collapse. In a downstream low-resource evaluation, augmenting 250 real training samples per class with GAN-generated digits from the best NAS model improves CNN classification accuracy from 91.0% to 96.5% (+5.5 percentage points), demonstrating that NAS-optimized synthesis produces digits of sufficient quality to benefit practical recognition pipelines when real data is scarce.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29540
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Can Coding Agents Build Robust Baselines? A Skill-Based Approach for Automating the Medical Imaging Model-Development Pipeline
2026-08-24 14:47:36Eugenia Moris, Jos\'e Ignacio OrlandoAbstract
Developing competitive deep learning baselines for medical imaging remains a highly iterative process requiring literature review, implementation, experimentation, and expert refinement. Existing automation approaches typically optimize isolated components, such as architecture search or hyperparameter tuning, rather than the complete baseline development process. We present an agentic AI Scientist workflow that combines literature-guided reasoning, automated code generation, and hypothesis-driven experimentation to generate competitive baseline models for medical imaging challenges. The framework is evaluated on four public benchmarks spanning segmentation, classification, and detection. Across all tasks, the Experimentation Pipeline consistently improves validation performance, achieving competitive leaderboard results, including 6th place on both PUMA tracks (15 teams) and 31st place on MILK10k (125 teams). On MIDOG25, the resulting model also demonstrates strong domain generalization across scanners, tumor types, and species. Using the same workflow across all challenges without task-specific redesign, we demonstrate that skill-based, literature-guided agentic workflows can substantially reduce the engineering effort required to develop competitive medical imaging baselines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23336
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PolyChirp: Multi-Species Birdsong Classification Using TinyML on Low-Power Acoustic Sensors
2026-08-24 11:06:51Nathan Duboisset, Zhaolan Huang, Felix Bie{\ss}mann, Roudy Dagher, Antoine Lavandier, Emmanuel BaccelliAbstract
Recent progress in the field of TinyML has demonstrated that low-power hardware based on microcontrollers can achieve bird species monitoring in real time based on acoustic sensor data for an entire breeding period on a single battery charge. However, the state of the art on low-power microcontrollers was so far limited to binary classification of a single species. In contrast, real fauna monitoring deployments often target multiple species simultaneously. To address this challenge we develop PolyChirp, an approach combining biological domain expertise, automated dataset curation, neural architecture optimization and novel hardware to achieve multiclass bird species detection in the wild. PolyChirp is based on newly designed tiny multiclass models that leverage recent microcontrollers and hardware acceleration with a neural processing unit (NPU). We evaluate the predictive performance of these models, and we measure their computational performance -- memory footprint, latency, energy consumption -- on common microcontroller hardware. Our results demonstrate that PolyChirp not only outperforms state-of-the-art on single species binary classification, but also achieves robust classification of up to 10 species simultaneously, while still fitting with the resource envelope of a sensor that must remain operational in the field for a full season on a single battery charge.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23101
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Bi-EZP: LLM-Guided Bilevel Program Evolution for Ensemble Zero-Cost Proxy Discovery
2026-08-22 11:34:35Yutao Lai, Kezhao Lai, Hai-Lin LiuAbstract
Zero-cost proxies enable neural architecture search (NAS) to rank candidate networks from statistics computed at initialization, avoiding repeated training. However, different proxies capture different properties and often produce inconsistent rankings across search spaces. Ensemble proxies can combine complementary signals, but automated discovery must optimize both discrete aggregation structures and their continuous coefficients, making structural quality difficult to separate from parameter calibration. We propose Bi-EZP, a bilevel framework that decouples these decisions. At the upper level, a large language model generates executable aggregation programs over four complementary base proxies with program-specific parameter bounds. At the lower level, covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) optimizes the continuous parameters of each fixed program on an inner training split. The calibrated programs are then evaluated using Kendall's rank correlation on a disjoint validation split, enabling evolutionary selection to favor structures that generalize beyond their calibration data. Experiments on NATS-Bench and Network Design Spaces evaluate ranking performance across heterogeneous search spaces, and DARTS experiments assess downstream architecture search. Results show that separating program discovery from numerical calibration provides an effective approach to automated ensemble zero-cost proxy construction. The source code is available at: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21927
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