NATS-Bench: Benchmarking NAS Algorithms for Architecture Topology and Size

TL;DR

NATS-Bench provides a comprehensive, standardized benchmark for evaluating NAS algorithms across architecture topology and size, enabling fair comparison and fostering research in neural architecture search.

Contribution

It introduces a unified benchmark with extensive search spaces for topology and size, allowing consistent evaluation of NAS algorithms across datasets.

Findings

Benchmark includes 15,625 neural cell candidates for topology.

Benchmark includes 32,768 candidates for architecture size.

Benchmark facilitates fair comparison of 13 state-of-the-art NAS algorithms.

Abstract

Neural architecture search (NAS) has attracted a lot of attention and has been illustrated to bring tangible benefits in a large number of applications in the past few years. Architecture topology and architecture size have been regarded as two of the most important aspects for the performance of deep learning models and the community has spawned lots of searching algorithms for both aspects of the neural architectures. However, the performance gain from these searching algorithms is achieved under different search spaces and training setups. This makes the overall performance of the algorithms to some extent incomparable and the improvement from a sub-module of the searching model unclear. In this paper, we propose NATS-Bench, a unified benchmark on searching for both topology and size, for (almost) any up-to-date NAS algorithm. NATS-Bench includes the search space of 15,625 neural cell candidates for architecture topology and 32,768 for architecture size on three datasets. We analyze the validity of our benchmark in terms of various criteria and performance comparison of all candidates in the search space. We also show the versatility of NATS-Bench by benchmarking 13 recent state-of-the-art NAS algorithms on it. All logs and diagnostic information trained using the same setup for each candidate are provided. This facilitates a much larger community of researchers to focus on developing better NAS algorithms in a more comparable and computationally cost friendly environment. All codes are publicly available at: https://xuanyidong.com/assets/projects/NATS-Bench.