# PrototypeNAS: Rapid Design of Deep Neural Networks for Microcontroller Units

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15106 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15106/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [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)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [FBNet: Hardware-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design via Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03443/) (2018)
- [Pruning neural networks without any data by iteratively conserving synaptic flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05467/) (2020)
- [InceptionTime: Finding AlexNet for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04939/) (2019)
- [MCUNet: Tiny Deep Learning on IoT Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10319/) (2020)
- [Neural Architecture Search without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04647/) (2020)
- [NATS-Bench: Benchmarking NAS Algorithms for Architecture Topology and Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00437/) (2020)
- [ZiCo: Zero-shot NAS via Inverse Coefficient of Variation on Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11300/) (2023)
- [Energy-efficient Deployment of Deep Learning Applications on Cortex-M based Microcontrollers using Deep Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10369/) (2022)
- [Combining Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Reinforcement Learning for TinyML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14109/) (2023)
- [ZiCo-BC: A Bias Corrected Zero-Shot NAS for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14666/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Weighted Response Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08841/) (2025)

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

- [Efficient Network Inference via Hardware-Aware Architecture Search, Model Pruning & Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enabling efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices with different hardware constraints is a challenging task that typically requires DNN architectures to be specialized for each device separately. To avoid the huge manual effort, one can use neural architecture search (NAS). However, many existing NAS methods are resource-intensive and time-consuming because they require the training of many different DNNs from scratch. Furthermore, they do not take the resource constraints of the target system into account. To address these shortcomings, we propose PrototypeNAS, a zero-shot NAS method to accelerate and automate the selection, compression, and specialization of DNNs to different target microcontroller units (MCUs). We propose a novel three-step search method that decouples DNN design and specialization from DNN training for a given target platform. First, we present a novel search space that not only cuts out smaller DNNs from a single large architecture, but instead combines the structural optimization of multiple architecture types, as well as optimization of their pruning and quantization configurations. Second, we explore the use of an ensemble of zero-shot proxies during optimization instead of a single one. Third, we propose the use of Hypervolume subset selection to distill DNN architectures from the Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization that represent the most meaningful tradeoffs between accuracy and FLOPs. We evaluate the effectiveness of PrototypeNAS on 12 different datasets in three different tasks: image classification, time series classification, and object detection. Our results demonstrate that PrototypeNAS is able to identify DNN models within minutes that are small enough to be deployed on off-the-shelf MCUs and still achieve accuracies comparable to the performance of large DNN models.