LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search - ACL Anthology

LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search

Ganesh Jawahar, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, Dujian Ding


Abstract
In this work, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for a novel use case: constructing Performance Predictors (PP) that estimate the performance of specific deep neural network architectures on downstream tasks. We create PP prompts for LLMs, comprising (i) role descriptions, (ii) instructions for the LLM, (iii) hyperparameter definitions, and (iv) demonstrations presenting sample architectures with efficiency metrics and ‘training from scratch’ performance. In machine translation (MT) tasks, GPT-4 with our PP prompts (LLM-PP) achieves a SoTA mean absolute error and a slight degradation in rank correlation coefficient compared to baseline predictors. Additionally, we demonstrate that predictions from LLM-PP can be distilled to a compact regression model (LLM-Distill-PP), which surprisingly retains much of the performance of LLM-PP. This presents a cost-effective alternative for resource-intensive performance estimation. Specifically, for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a Hybrid-Search algorithm (HS-NAS) employing LLM-Distill-PP for the initial search stages and reverting to the baseline predictor later. HS-NAS performs similarly to SoTA NAS, reducing search hours by approximately 50%, and in some cases, improving latency, GFLOPs, and model size. The code can be found at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/llmas.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.627
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10540–10560
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.627
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.627
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ganesh Jawahar, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, and Dujian Ding. 2024. LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 10540–10560, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search (Jawahar et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.627.pdf