GreenMachine: Automatic Design of Zero-Cost Proxies for Energy-Efficient NAS

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has driven innovations and created new opportunities across various sectors. However, leveraging domain-specific knowledge often requires automated tools to design and configure models effectively. In the case of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), researchers and practitioners usually resort to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches, which are resource- and time-intensive, requiring the training and evaluation of numerous candidate architectures. This raises sustainability concerns, particularly due to the high energy demands involved, creating a paradox: the pursuit of the most effective model can undermine sustainability goals. To mitigate this issue, zero-cost proxies have emerged as a promising alternative. These proxies estimate a model's performance without the need for full training, offering a more efficient approach. This paper addresses the challenges of model evaluation by automatically designing zero-cost proxies to assess DNNs efficiently. Our method begins with a randomly generated set of zero-cost proxies, which are evolved and tested using the NATS-Bench benchmark. We assess the proxies' effectiveness using both randomly sampled and stratified subsets of the search space, ensuring they can differentiate between low- and high-performing networks and enhance generalizability. Results show our method outperforms existing approaches on the stratified sampling strategy, achieving strong correlations with ground truth performance, including a Kendall correlation of 0.89 on CIFAR-10 and 0.77 on CIFAR-100 with NATS-Bench-SSS and a Kendall correlation of 0.78 on CIFAR-10 and 0.71 on CIFAR-100 with NATS-Bench-TSS.

Exploring Layerwise Adversarial Robustness Through the Lens of t-SNE

Adversarial examples, designed to trick Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) into producing wrong outputs, highlight vulnerabilities in these models. Exploring these weaknesses is crucial for developing defenses, and so, we propose a method to assess the adversarial robustness of image-classifying ANNs. The t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) technique is used for visual inspection, and a metric, which compares the clean and perturbed embeddings, helps pinpoint weak spots in the layers. Analyzing two ANNs on CIFAR-10, one designed by humans and another via NeuroEvolution, we found that differences between clean and perturbed representations emerge early on, in the feature extraction layers, affecting subsequent classification. The findings with our metric are supported by the visual analysis of the t-SNE maps.

Towards Physical Plausibility in Neuroevolution Systems

The increasing usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, especially Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), is increasing the power consumption during training and inference, posing environmental concerns and driving the need for more energy-efficient algorithms and hardware solutions. This work addresses the growing energy consumption problem in Machine Learning (ML), particularly during the inference phase. Even a slight reduction in power usage can lead to significant energy savings, benefiting users, companies, and the environment. Our approach focuses on maximizing the accuracy of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models using a neuroevolutionary framework whilst minimizing their power consumption. To do so, power consumption is considered in the fitness function. We introduce a new mutation strategy that stochastically reintroduces modules of layers, with power-efficient modules having a higher chance of being chosen. We introduce a novel technique that allows training two separate models in a single training step whilst promoting one of them to be more power efficient than the other while maintaining similar accuracy. The results demonstrate a reduction in power consumption of ANN models by up to 29.2% without a significant decrease in predictive performance.

SPENSER: Towards a NeuroEvolutionary Approach for Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted recent interest due to their energy efficiency and biological plausibility. However, the performance of SNNs still lags behind traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), as there is no consensus on the best learning algorithm for SNNs. Best-performing SNNs are based on ANN to SNN conversion or learning with spike-based backpropagation through surrogate gradients. The focus of recent research has been on developing and testing different learning strategies, with hand-tailored architectures and parameter tuning. Neuroevolution (NE), has proven successful as a way to automatically design ANNs and tune parameters, but its applications to SNNs are still at an early stage. DENSER is a NE framework for the automatic design and parametrization of ANNs, based on the principles of Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE). In this paper, we propose SPENSER, a NE framework for SNN generation based on DENSER, for image classification on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. SPENSER generates competitive performing networks with a test accuracy of 99.42% and 91.65% respectively.

Automatic Design of Telecom Networks with Genetic Algorithms

With the increasing demand for high-quality internet services, deploying GPON/Fiber-to-the-Home networks is one of the biggest challenges that internet providers have to deal with due to the significant investments involved. Automated network design usage becomes more critical to aid with planning the network by minimising the costs of planning and deployment. The main objective is to tackle this problem of optimisation of networks that requires taking into account multiple factors such as the equipment placement and their configuration, the optimisation of the cable routes, the optimisation of the clients' allocation and other constraints involved in the minimisation problem. An AI-based solution is proposed to automate network design, which is a task typically done manually by teams of engineers. It is a difficult task requiring significant time to complete manually. To alleviate this tiresome task, we proposed a Genetic Algorithm using a two-level representation to design the networks automatically. To validate the approach, we compare the quality of the generated solutions with the handmade design ones that are deployed in the real world. The results show that our method can save costs and time in finding suitable and better solutions than existing ones, indicating its potential as a support design tool of solutions for GPON/Fiber-to-the-Home networks. In concrete, in the two scenarios where we validate our proposal, our approach can cut costs by 31% and by 52.2%, respectively, when compared with existing handmade ones, showcasing and validating the potential of the proposed approach.

Reducing the Price of Stable Cable Stayed Bridges with CMA-ES

The design of cable-stayed bridges requires the determination of several design variables' values. Civil engineers usually perform this task by hand as an iteration of steps that stops when the engineer is happy with both the cost and maintaining the structural constraints of the solution. The problem's difficulty arises from the fact that changing a variable may affect other variables, meaning that they are not independent, suggesting that we are facing a deceptive landscape. In this work, we compare two approaches to a baseline solution: a Genetic Algorithm and a CMA-ES algorithm. There are two objectives when designing the bridges: minimizing the cost and maintaining the structural constraints in acceptable values to be considered safe. These are conflicting objectives, meaning that decreasing the cost often results in a bridge that is not structurally safe. The results suggest that CMA-ES is a better option for finding good solutions in the search space, beating the baseline with the same amount of evaluations, while the Genetic Algorithm could not. In concrete, the CMA-ES approach is able to design bridges that are cheaper and structurally safe.

All You Need Is Sex for Diversity

Maintaining genetic diversity as a means to avoid premature convergence is critical in Genetic Programming. Several approaches have been proposed to achieve this, with some focusing on the mating phase from coupling dissimilar solutions to some form of self-adaptive selection mechanism. In nature, genetic diversity can be the consequence of many different factors, but when considering reproduction Sexual Selection can have an impact on promoting variety within a species. Specifically, Mate Choice often results in different selective pressures between sexes, which in turn may trigger evolutionary differences among them. Although some mechanisms of Sexual Selection have been applied to Genetic Programming in the past, the literature is scarce when it comes to mate choice. Recently, a way of modelling mating preferences by ideal mate representations was proposed, achieving good results when compared to a standard approach. These mating preferences evolve freely in a self-adaptive fashion, creating an evolutionary driving force of its own alongside fitness pressure. The inner mechanisms of this approach operate from personal choice, as each individual has its own representation of a perfect mate which affects the mate to be selected. In this paper, we compare this method against a random mate choice to assess whether there are advantages in evolving personal preferences. We conducted experiments using three symbolic regression problems and different mutation rates. The results show that self-adaptive mating preferences are able to create a more diverse set of solutions when compared to the traditional approach and a random mate approach (with statistically significant differences) and have a higher success rate in three of the six instances tested.

Context Matters: Adaptive Mutation for Grammars

This work proposes Adaptive Facilitated Mutation, a self-adaptive mutation method for Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE), biologically inspired by the theory of facilitated variation. In SGE, the genotype of individuals contains a list for each non-terminal of the grammar that defines the search space. In our proposed mutation, each individual contains an array with a different, self-adaptive mutation rate for each non-terminal. We also propose Function Grouped Grammars, a grammar design procedure, to enhance the benefits of the proposed mutation. Experiments were conducted on three symbolic regression benchmarks using Probabilistic Structured Grammatical Evolution (PSGE), a variant of SGE. Results show our approach is similar or better when compared with the standard grammar and mutation.

Structured mutation inspired by evolutionary theory enriches population performance and diversity

Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming (GGGP) employs a variety of insights from evolutionary theory to autonomously design solutions for a given task. Recent insights from evolutionary biology can lead to further improvements in GGGP algorithms. In this paper, we apply principles from the theory of Facilitated Variation and knowledge about heterogeneous mutation rates and mutation effects to improve the variation operators. We term this new method of variation Facilitated Mutation (FM). We test FM performance on the evolution of neural network optimizers for image classification, a relevant task in evolutionary computation, with important implications for the field of machine learning. We compare FM and FM combined with crossover (FMX) against a typical mutation regime to assess the benefits of the approach. We find that FMX in particular provides statistical improvements in key metrics, creating a superior optimizer overall (+0.48\% average test accuracy), improving the average quality of solutions (+50\% average population fitness), and discovering more diverse high-quality behaviors (+400 high-quality solutions discovered per run on average). Additionally, FM and FMX can reduce the number of fitness evaluations in an evolutionary run, reducing computational costs in some scenarios.

Adversarial Robustness Assessment of NeuroEvolution Approaches

NeuroEvolution automates the generation of Artificial Neural Networks through the application of techniques from Evolutionary Computation. The main goal of these approaches is to build models that maximize predictive performance, sometimes with an additional objective of minimizing computational complexity. Although the evolved models achieve competitive results performance-wise, their robustness to adversarial examples, which becomes a concern in security-critical scenarios, has received limited attention. In this paper, we evaluate the adversarial robustness of models found by two prominent NeuroEvolution approaches on the CIFAR-10 image classification task: DENSER and NSGA-Net. Since the models are publicly available, we consider white-box untargeted attacks, where the perturbations are bounded by either the L2 or the Linfinity-norm. Similarly to manually-designed networks, our results show that when the evolved models are attacked with iterative methods, their accuracy usually drops to, or close to, zero under both distance metrics. The DENSER model is an exception to this trend, showing some resistance under the L2 threat model, where its accuracy only drops from 93.70% to 18.10% even with iterative attacks. Additionally, we analyzed the impact of pre-processing applied to the data before the first layer of the network. Our observations suggest that some of these techniques can exacerbate the perturbations added to the original inputs, potentially harming robustness. Thus, this choice should not be neglected when automatically designing networks for applications where adversarial attacks are prone to occur.