{"title":"Dominant Classifier-assisted Hybrid Evolutionary Multi-objective Neural Architecture Search.","authors":"Yu Xue, Keyu Liu, Ferrante Neri","doi":"10.1142/S0129065725500510","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Neural Architecture Search (NAS) automates the design of deep neural networks but remains computationally expensive, particularly in multi-objective settings. Existing predictor-assisted evolutionary NAS methods suffer from slow convergence and rank disorder, which undermines prediction accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we propose CHENAS: a Classifier-assisted multi-objective Hybrid Evolutionary NAS framework. CHENAS combines the global exploration of evolutionary algorithms with the local refinement of gradient-based optimization to accelerate convergence and enhance solution quality. A novel dominance classifier predicts Pareto dominance relationships among candidate architectures, reframing multi-objective optimization as a classification task and mitigating rank disorder. To further improve efficiency, we employ a contrastive learning-based autoencoder that maps architectures into a continuous, structured latent space tailored for dominance prediction. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that CHENAS outperforms state-of-the-art NAS approaches in identifying high-performing architectures across multiple objectives. Future work will focus on improving the computational efficiency of the framework and extending it to other application domains.</p>","PeriodicalId":94052,"journal":{"name":"International journal of neural systems","volume":" ","pages":"2550051"},"PeriodicalIF":6.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International journal of neural systems","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S0129065725500510","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/7/31 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) automates the design of deep neural networks but remains computationally expensive, particularly in multi-objective settings. Existing predictor-assisted evolutionary NAS methods suffer from slow convergence and rank disorder, which undermines prediction accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we propose CHENAS: a Classifier-assisted multi-objective Hybrid Evolutionary NAS framework. CHENAS combines the global exploration of evolutionary algorithms with the local refinement of gradient-based optimization to accelerate convergence and enhance solution quality. A novel dominance classifier predicts Pareto dominance relationships among candidate architectures, reframing multi-objective optimization as a classification task and mitigating rank disorder. To further improve efficiency, we employ a contrastive learning-based autoencoder that maps architectures into a continuous, structured latent space tailored for dominance prediction. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that CHENAS outperforms state-of-the-art NAS approaches in identifying high-performing architectures across multiple objectives. Future work will focus on improving the computational efficiency of the framework and extending it to other application domains.