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LLMENAS: Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Model Guidance

delete2026-03-04
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PRE
AI
Y
Yutao Lai
Z
Zicheng Cai
L
Lei Chen
T
Tongtao Ling
H
Hai‐Lin Liu
DOI:10.1109/tevc.2026.3670336delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) and traditional evolutionary approaches frequently struggle with premature convergence to local optima. To overcome this limitation, we propose LLMENAS, a hierarchical framework that introduces trajectory-aware fitness design as the upper-level optimizer. By analyzing the convergence state of historical optimization trajectories, the large language model (LLM) acts as a fitness designer to dynamically design fitness functions. This mechanism enables the search to navigate complex landscapes and escape local optima. Furthermore, we introduce a closed-loop self-improving mechanism, enabling the LLM to iteratively enhance its design strategies through self-reflection and self-refinement based on feedback. Extensive experiments show that LLMENAS achieves competitive results, with top-1 accuracies of 97.58% on CIFAR-10, 83.52% on CIFAR-100, and 75.6% on ImageNet-1k. Furthermore, it is achieved with remarkable efficiency, costing only 0.15 GPU days on the CIFAR 10 datasets and 2 GPU days on ImageNet. The source code is publicly available at: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/LLMENAS/LLMENAS</uri>
Keywords:
Evolutionary strategy
image classification
large language model (LLM)
neural architecture search (NAS)

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation cover
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
IF:
12
Papers:
1.8K
Citations:
2.4W

Organization

G
guangdong university of technology
Scholars:
2.8W
Papers: 1.9W
Citations: 36
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