LLMatic: Neural Architecture Search Via Large Language Models And Quality Diversity Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of accomplishing a broad spectrum of tasks.Their abilities span numerous areas, and one area where they have made a significant impact is in the domain of code generation.Here, we propose using the coding abilities of LLMs to introduce meaningful variations to code defining neural networks.Meanwhile, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are known to discover diverse and robust solutions.By merging the code-generating abilities of LLMs with the diversity and robustness of QD solutions, we introduce LLMatic, a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm.While LLMs struggle to conduct NAS directly through prompts, LLMatic uses a procedural approach, leveraging QD for prompts and network architecture to create diverse and high-performing networks.We test LLMatic on the CIFAR-10 and NAS-bench-201 benchmarks, demonstrating that it can produce competitive networks while evaluating just 2, 000 candidates, even without prior knowledge of the benchmark domain or exposure to any previous top-performing models for the benchmark.The open-sourced code is available in https://github.com/umair-nasir14/LLMatic.