A Pairwise Comparison Relation-assisted Multi-objective Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search Method with Multi-population Mechanism
Neural architecture search (NAS) suffers from high evaluation overhead and model redundancy due to single-objective optimization (e.g., accuracy only). To address this, we propose an efficient multi-objective NAS framework. Our method introduces: (1) a novel lightweight surrogate model based on pairwise comparison that predicts relative architectural rankings instead of absolute accuracy—substantially reducing evaluation cost; and (2) a master–auxiliary dual-population co-evolutionary mechanism that enhances population diversity while ensuring convergence. Evaluated on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet, our approach completes search in just 0.17 GPU-days on a single GPU. On ImageNet, it discovers a compact architecture achieving 78.91% Top-1 accuracy with only 570M MAdds. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our framework improves search efficiency by multiple orders of magnitude and significantly strengthens multi-objective optimization across accuracy, parameter count, and computational cost.