# FOX-NAS: Fast, On-device and Explainable Neural Architecture Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.08189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Progressive Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00559/) (2017)
- [FBNetV2: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Spatial and Channel Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05565/) (2020)
- [FairNAS: Rethinking Evaluation Fairness of Weight Sharing Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01845/) (2019)
- [FBNetV3: Joint Architecture-Recipe Search using Predictor Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02049/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [AdaptiveNet: Post-deployment Neural Architecture Adaptation for Diverse Edge Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07129/) (2023)
- [MAPLE: Microprocessor A Priori for Latency Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15106/) (2021)
- [Efficient Automation of Neural Network Design: A Survey on Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05405/) (2023)
- [Design Automation for Fast, Lightweight, and Effective Deep Learning Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10498/) (2022)
- [Generative Model for Models: Rapid DNN Customization for Diverse Tasks and Resource Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15003/) (2023)
- [Explainable Graph Neural Architecture Search via Monte-Carlo Tree Search (Full version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15734/) (2023)
- [Task-Oriented Real-time Visual Inference for IoVT Systems: A Co-design Framework of Neural Networks and Edge Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00838/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural architecture search can discover neural networks with good performance, and One-Shot approaches are prevalent. One-Shot approaches typically require a supernet with weight sharing and predictors that predict the performance of architecture. However, the previous methods take much time to generate performance predictors thus are inefficient. To this end, we propose FOX-NAS that consists of fast and explainable predictors based on simulated annealing and multivariate regression. Our method is quantization-friendly and can be efficiently deployed to the edge. The experiments on different hardware show that FOX-NAS models outperform some other popular neural network architectures. For example, FOX-NAS matches MobileNetV2 and EfficientNet-Lite0 accuracy with 240% and 40% less latency on the edge CPU. FOX-NAS is the 3rd place winner of the 2020 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC), DSP classification track. See all evaluation results at https://lpcv.ai/competitions/2020. Search code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/great8nctu/FOX-NAS.