arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

LESS: Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search in Minutes

LESS (Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search) is a data‑driven NAS method that uses a brief hard‑path warm‑up and CMA‑ES to evaluate candidate architectures as decoded hard genotypes after six supernet updates. On NAS‑Bench‑201, LESS attains 93.189 % CIFAR‑10 accuracy in just 409.1 seconds, nearly matching FairNAS while using only about 1/24 of its search time. The approach also transfers well to CIFAR‑100, ImageNet16‑120, and the larger DARTS space, achieving high accuracies with searches completed in roughly 43.5 minutes on a single GPU.

By Aviral Gandhi, Jinglue Xu, Jialong Li, Hitoshi Iba