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Weight-Entanglement Meets Gradient-Based Neural Architecture Search

Machine Learning 2025-11-11 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Weight sharing is a fundamental concept in neural architecture search (NAS), enabling gradient-based methods to explore cell-based architectural spaces significantly faster than traditional black-box approaches. In parallel, weight-entanglement has emerged as a technique for more intricate parameter sharing amongst macro-architectural spaces. Since weight-entanglement is not directly compatible with gradient-based NAS methods, these two paradigms have largely developed independently in parallel sub-communities. This paper aims to bridge the gap between these sub-communities by proposing a novel scheme to adapt gradient-based methods for weight-entangled spaces. This enables us to conduct an in-depth comparative assessment and analysis of the performance of gradient-based NAS in weight-entangled search spaces. Our findings reveal that this integration of weight-entanglement and gradient-based NAS brings forth the various benefits of gradient-based methods, while preserving the memory efficiency of weight-entangled spaces. The code for our work is openly accessible https://github.com/automl/TangleNAS.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.10440,
  title  = {Weight-Entanglement Meets Gradient-Based Neural Architecture Search},
  author = {Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker and Arjun Krishnakumar and Mahmoud Safari and Frank Hutter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.10440},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:53:30.152Z