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CoRA-NAS: Coarse Ranking and Anchor-Residual Refinement for Neural Architecture Search

arxiv.org/abs/2609.11884

Updated 22 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294FPG273XT44N3F1ZR6XK9

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 23 min ago
arXiv
2609.11884
T1 · 23 min ago
Category
cs.LG
T1 · 23 min ago

Abstract

Zero-cost proxies rank architectures cheaply, but their reliability varies across search spaces. We introduce CoRA-NAS (COarse Ranking + Anchor-residual), a two-stage framework combining a static ranking prior with low-cost learning-curve refinement. CoRA-Rank aggregates capacity and structure-at-initialization proxies through an equal-weight log-rank consensus and a target-free consensus gate. CoRA-Refine samples anchors across this prior, extrapolates their early validation curves, and propagates a learned residual correction with an ExtraTrees model. The refinement uses approximately 1% of the cost of fully training the candidate set. Fully trained architecture-accuracy labels are not used to fit the ranker. One configuration is used across spaces, with space-specific architecture encodings. Across NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-101, TransNAS-Bench-101, and NATS-SSS, CoRA-Refine achieves mean Spearman correlations of 0.946, 0.715, 0.786, and 0.894, respectively. Its worst-space correlation of 0.715 is the highest among the compared methods. On NAS-Bench-201/CIFAR-100, its selected architecture reaches 73.32% accuracy, near the reported ground-truth best of 73.37%. On the pure size space, refinement recovers the static prior's shortfall relative to parameter count, while remaining tied with the strongest capacity proxies within noise. The resulting framework combines cross-space ranking robustness with low-cost architecture selection.

Authors 5

Yifan Yang, Zhaoyan Wang, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Jiaojiao Jiang

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 23 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
cross

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 22 min agohigh

arXiv id
2609.11884

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 23 min agohigh

Categories
cs.LG, cs.CV

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 23 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 23 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.LG

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 23 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 23 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

22 min ago

Conflicts

None