DCLP: Neural Architecture Predictor with Curriculum Contrastive Learning

Neural predictors currently show great potential in the performance evaluation phase of neural architecture search (NAS). Despite their efficiency in the evaluation process, it is challenging to train the predictor with fewer architecture evaluations for efficient NAS. However, most of the current approaches are more concerned with improving the structure of the predictor to solve this problem, while the full use of the information contained in unlabeled data is less explored. To address this issue, we introduce a contrastive learning framework with curriculum learning guidance for the neural predictor called DCLP. To be specific, we develop a plan for the training order of positive samples during pre-training through the proposed difficulty measurer and training scheduler, and utilize the contrastive learner to learn representations of data. Compared with existing predictors, we experimentally demonstrate that DCLP has high accuracy and efficiency, and also shows an encouraging ability to discover superior architectures in multiple search spaces when combined with search strategies.