# NAS-Bench-201: Extending the Scope of Reproducible Neural Architecture Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 416 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 416)

- [Zero-Cost Proxies for Lightweight NAS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08134/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Few-shot Learning: Evolution, Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06743/) (2022)
- [Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator: Understanding Its Algorithm Components and Their Roles for Better Empirical Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11127/) (2023)
- [Neural Architecture Search: Insights from 1000 Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08727/) (2023)
- [HPOBench: A Collection of Reproducible Multi-Fidelity Benchmark Problems for HPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06716/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Architecture Selection in Differentiable NAS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04392/) (2021)
- [How Powerful are Performance Predictors in Neural Architecture Search?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01177/) (2021)
- [Data Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04272/) (2023)
- [LLMatic: Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Models and Quality Diversity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01102/) (2023)
- [HW-NAS-Bench:Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10584/) (2021)
- [DataDAM: Efficient Dataset Distillation with Attention Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00093/) (2023)
- [Towards Learning Universal Hyperparameter Optimizers with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13320/) (2022)
- [HPO-B: A Large-Scale Reproducible Benchmark for Black-Box HPO based on OpenML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06257/) (2021)
- [Can GPT-4 Perform Neural Architecture Search?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10970/) (2023)
- [DC-BENCH: Dataset Condensation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09639/) (2022)
- [β-DARTS: Beta-Decay Regularization for Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01665/) (2022)
- [BossNAS: Exploring Hybrid CNN-transformers with Block-wisely Self-supervised Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12424/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09336/) (2021)
- [TransNAS-Bench-101: Improving Transferability and Generalizability of Cross-Task Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11871/) (2021)
- [ZiCo: Zero-shot NAS via Inverse Coefficient of Variation on Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11300/) (2023)
- [Neural Architecture Search for Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10355/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Green Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05193/) (2021)
- [iDARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search with Stochastic Implicit Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10784/) (2021)
- [AutoPEFT: Automatic Configuration Search for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12132/) (2023)
- [MQBench: Towards Reproducible and Deployable Model Quantization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03759/) (2021)
- [Monte Carlo Tree Search based Variable Selection for High Dimensional Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01628/) (2022)
- [Efficient Bayesian Learning Curve Extrapolation using Prior-Data Fitted Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20447/) (2023)
- [NAS-Bench-Suite: NAS Evaluation is (Now) Surprisingly Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13396/) (2022)
- [NAS-Bench-Suite-Zero: Accelerating Research on Zero Cost Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03230/) (2022)
- [AutoDropout: Learning Dropout Patterns to Regularize Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01761/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved breakthrough success in a great number of applications in the past few years. It could be time to take a step back and analyze the good and bad aspects in the field of NAS. A variety of algorithms search architectures under different search space. These searched architectures are trained using different setups, e.g., hyper-parameters, data augmentation, regularization. This raises a comparability problem when comparing the performance of various NAS algorithms. NAS-Bench-101 has shown success to alleviate this problem. In this work, we propose an extension to NAS-Bench-101: NAS-Bench-201 with a different search space, results on multiple datasets, and more diagnostic information. NAS-Bench-201 has a fixed search space and provides a unified benchmark for almost any up-to-date NAS algorithms. The design of our search space is inspired from the one used in the most popular cell-based searching algorithms, where a cell is represented as a DAG. Each edge here is associated with an operation selected from a predefined operation set. For it to be applicable for all NAS algorithms, the search space defined in NAS-Bench-201 includes all possible architectures generated by 4 nodes and 5 associated operation options, which results in 15,625 candidates in total. The training log and the performance for each architecture candidate are provided for three datasets. This allows researchers to avoid unnecessary repetitive training for selected candidate and focus solely on the search algorithm itself. The training time saved for every candidate also largely improves the efficiency of many methods. We provide additional diagnostic information such as fine-grained loss and accuracy, which can give inspirations to new designs of NAS algorithms. In further support, we have analyzed it from many aspects and benchmarked 10 recent NAS algorithms.