# ZiCo-BC: A Bias Corrected Zero-Shot NAS for Vision Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14666 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14666/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [NAS-Bench-201: Extending the Scope of Reproducible Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00326/) (2020)
- [A Downsampled Variant of ImageNet as an Alternative to the CIFAR datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08819/) (2017)
- [NAS-Bench-101: Towards Reproducible Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09635/) (2019)
- [Zen-NAS: A Zero-Shot NAS for High-Performance Deep Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01063/) (2021)
- [ZiCo: Zero-shot NAS via Inverse Coefficient of Variation on Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11300/) (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)
- [Distilling Optimal Neural Networks: Rapid Search in Diverse Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08859/) (2020)
- [Unifying and Boosting Gradient-Based Training-Free Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09785/) (2022)
- [MAE-DET: Revisiting Maximum Entropy Principle in Zero-Shot NAS for Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13336/) (2021)
- [DeepMAD: Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02165/) (2023)
- [Zero-Cost Operation Scoring in Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06799/) (2021)
- [Restructurable Activation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08562/) (2022)
- [Simple and Efficient Architectures for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08236/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PrototypeNAS: Rapid Design of Deep Neural Networks for Microcontroller Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15106/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches propose novel training-free metrics called zero-shot proxies to substantially reduce the search time compared to the traditional training-based NAS. Despite the success on image classification, the effectiveness of zero-shot proxies is rarely evaluated on complex vision tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection. Moreover, existing zero-shot proxies are shown to be biased towards certain model characteristics which restricts their broad applicability. In this paper, we empirically study the bias of state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot proxy ZiCo across multiple vision tasks and observe that ZiCo is biased towards thinner and deeper networks, leading to sub-optimal architectures. To solve the problem, we propose a novel bias correction on ZiCo, called ZiCo-BC. Our extensive experiments across various vision tasks (image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation) show that our approach can successfully search for architectures with higher accuracy and significantly lower latency on Samsung Galaxy S10 devices.