THNAS-GA: A Genetic Algorithm for Training-free Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a promising approach to automate the design of neural network architectures, which can find architectures that perform better than manually designed ones. Hardware-aware NAS is a real-world application of NAS where the architectures found also need to satisfy certain requirements for the deployment of specific devices. Despite the practical importance, hardware-aware NAS still receives a lack of attention from the community. Existing research mostly focuses on the search space with a limited number of architectures, reducing the search process to finding the optimal hyperparameters. In addition, the performance evaluation of found networks is resources-intensive, which can severely hinder reproducibility. In this work, we propose a genetic algorithm approach to the hardware-aware NAS problem, incorporating a latency filtering selection to guarantee the latency validity of candidate solutions. We also introduce an extended search space that can cover various existing architectures from previous research. To speed up the search process, we also present a method to estimate the latency of candidate networks and a training-free performance estimation method to quickly evaluate candidate networks. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art networks while maintaining lower latency with less computation requirements for searching.