G-ICSO-NAS: Shifting Gears between Gradient and Swarm for Robust Neural Architecture Search

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00703v1
• Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:06:59 GMT
• Title: G-ICSO-NAS: Shifting Gears between Gradient and Swarm for Robust Neural Architecture Search
• Abstract summary: G-ICSO-NAS is a hybrid framework implementing a three-stage optimization strategy.<n>In the context of the DARTS search space, an accuracy of 97.46% is achieved on CIFAR-10 with a computational budget of just 0.15 GPU-Days.<n>G-ICSO-NAS is shown to deliver state-of-the-art results across all evaluated datasets.
• Score: 10.803903846647643
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become a pivotal technique in automated machine learning. Evolutionary Algorithm (EA)-based methods demonstrate superior search quality but suffer from prohibitive computational costs, while gradient-based approaches like DARTS offer high efficiency but are prone to premature convergence and performance collapse. To bridge this gap, we propose G-ICSO-NAS, a hybrid framework implementing a three-stage optimization strategy. The Warm-up Phase pre-trains supernet weights ($w$) via differentiable methods while architecture parameters ($α$) remain frozen. The Exploration Phase adopts a hybrid co-optimization mechanism: an Improved Competitive Swarm Optimizer (ICSO) with diversity-aware fitness navigates the architecture space to update $α$, while gradient descent concurrently updates $w$. The Stability Phase employs fine-grained gradient-based search with early stopping to converge to the optimal architecture. By synergizing ICSO's global navigation capability with differentiable methods' efficiency, G-ICSO-NAS achieves remarkable performance with minimal cost. In the context of the DARTS search space, an accuracy of 97.46\% is achieved on CIFAR-10 with a computational budget of just 0.15 GPU-Days. The method also exhibits strong transfer potential, recording accuracies of 83.1\% (CIFAR-100) and 75.02\% (ImageNet). Furthermore, regarding the NAS-Bench-201 benchmark, G-ICSO-NAS is shown to deliver state-of-the-art results across all evaluated datasets.

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