FL-NAS: Towards Fairness of NAS for Resource Constrained Devices via Large Language Models

Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become the de fecto tools in the industry in automating the design of deep neural networks for various applications, especially those driven by mobile and edge devices with limited computing resources. The emerging LLMs, due to their prowess, have also been incorporated into NAS recently and show some promising results. This paper conducts further exploration in this direction by considering three important design metrics simultaneously, i.e., model accuracy, fairness, and hardware deployment efficiency. We propose a novel LLM-based NAS framework, FL-NAS, in this paper, and show experimentally that FL-NAS can indeed find high-performing DNNs, beating state-of-the-art DNN models by orders-of-magnitude across almost all design considerations.