DIFFNAS: Predictor-Free Neural Architecture Search via Diffusion Model and Zero-Cost Evaluation

Yize Sun, Hanzhang Ma, Zixin Wu, Xuechun Li, Volker Tresp +1

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has advanced the automated design of deep networks, but remains computationally expensive due to reliance on model training or performance predictors. We introduce DIFFNAS, a predictor-free NAS framework that leverages a discrete graph diffusion model guided by zero-cost performance proxies. Unlike prior diffusion-based NAS methods that require learned performance predictors, DIFFNAS conditions the generative process on training-free metrics such as MeCo and SWAP, enabling efficient architecture search with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on NAS-Bench-201 show that DIFFNAS finds the optimal architectures for CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 (94.37% and 73.51%) without a pretrained predictor, while reducing search cost by up to 17.5x compared to DiffusionNAG. On the MobileNetV3 search space, its accuracy is lower than that of DiffusionNAG. These results highlight the promise of diffusion models combined with zero-cost proxies for scalable and effective architecture search.