# Multi-Objective Hardware Aware Neural Architecture Search using Hardware Cost Diversity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12403/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6229/) (2013)
- [Understanding and Robustifying Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09656/) (2019)
- [HW-NAS-Bench:Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10584/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09336/) (2021)
- [Multi-Objective Reinforced Evolution in Mobile Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01074/) (2019)
- [LSPnet: A 2D Localization-oriented Spacecraft Pose Estimation Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09248/) (2021)
- [Evolving Neural Architecture Using One Shot Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12540/) (2020)
- [Neural Architecture Search using Progressive Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01559/) (2022)
- [Novelty Driven Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00188/) (2022)
- [Hardware Aware Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search using Representation Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03923/) (2023)
- [Neural Architecture Search using Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07266/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Energy-Efficient Deep Learning for Traffic Classification on Microcontrollers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10851/) (2025)
- [QNAS: A Neural Architecture Search Framework for Accurate and Efficient Quantum Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07013/) (2026)
- [FPG-NAS: FLOPs-Aware Gated Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Efficient 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03618/) (2025)
- [Designing Object Detection Models for TinyML: Foundations, Comparative Analysis, Challenges, and Emerging Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08352/) (2025)
- [SNAC-Pack 2.0: Scaled-Out Surrogate Neural Architecture Codesign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16138/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search approaches (HW-NAS) automate the design of deep learning architectures, tailored specifically to a given target hardware platform. Yet, these techniques demand substantial computational resources, primarily due to the expensive process of assessing the performance of identified architectures. To alleviate this problem, a recent direction in the literature has employed representation similarity metric for efficiently evaluating architecture performance. Nonetheless, since it is inherently a single objective method, it requires multiple runs to identify the optimal architecture set satisfying the diverse hardware cost constraints, thereby increasing the search cost. Furthermore, simply converting the single objective into a multi-objective approach results in an under-explored architectural search space. In this study, we propose a Multi-Objective method to address the HW-NAS problem, called MO-HDNAS, to identify the trade-off set of architectures in a single run with low computational cost. This is achieved by optimizing three objectives: maximizing the representation similarity metric, minimizing hardware cost, and maximizing the hardware cost diversity. The third objective, i.e. hardware cost diversity, is used to facilitate a better exploration of the architecture search space. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in efficiently addressing the HW-NAS problem across six edge devices for the image classification task.