aiqbench analysis
This study introduces TGL-NSGA-II, a teacher-guided framework that improves the efficiency of neural architecture search for TinyML by using low-fidelity proxies to filter candidates before full evaluation. By stratifying samples based on difficulty and class, the method reduces proxy-score variance by 41% while maintaining high ranking accuracy compared to standard evolutionary algorithms. The approach demonstrates significant speedups without compromising solution quality in constrained computational budgets.
Rank-Reliable Teacher-Guided Fitness Approximation for Expensive Evolutionary Optimization: A TinyML Architecture Search Study
arXiv:2609.30553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expensive evolutionary search does not always need an exact fitness estimate for every candidate. It often needs a reliable answer to a simpler question: which candidate is better? We address this need through Teacher-Guided Learning NSGA-II (TGL-NSGA-II), a low-fidelity framework for constrained Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) neural architecture search. A pretrained teacher organizes samples into strata defined jointly by difficulty and class. Each candidate then undergoes KD-Lite, a short and capped knowledge-distillation procedure on a compact training set, before being scored on a separate stratified evaluation set. This teacher-guided score is fused with a Gaussian-process surrogate to select candidates for full evaluation. For a fixed candidate population, we analyse evaluation variance, score concentration, pairwise rank inversion, expected Kendall-$\tau$, first-front identification, and hypervolume perturbation. We also derive a variance-aware fusion weight and a capacity-adaptive distillation rule. On keyword spotting and bird-call classification, the measured Kendall-$\tau$ values are 0.74 and 0.62, exceeding the corresponding predicted lower bounds of 0.60 and 0.46. Joint stratification reduces proxy-score variance by 41% relative to random evaluation. Selective teacher mismatch, in contrast, increases differential bias and reduces Kendall-$\tau$ to 0.41. Under a constrained evaluation budget, TGL-NSGA-II achieves the largest mean hypervolume and smallest generational distance on keyword spotting, records the lowest mean false-positive rate on BirdCLEF, and runs 2.2x faster than full NSGA-II. These guarantees apply to population-level low-fidelity evaluation and do not establish convergence of the complete evolutionary trajectory.
Abstract:Expensive evolutionary search does not always need an exact fitness estimate for every candidate. It often needs a reliable answer to a simpler question: which candidate is better? We address this need through Teacher-Guided Learning NSGA-II (TGL-NSGA-II), a low-fidelity framework for constrained Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) neural architecture search. A pretrained teacher organizes samples into strata defined jointly by difficulty and class. Each candidate then undergoes KD-Lite, a short and capped knowledge-distillation procedure on a compact training set, before being scored on a separate stratified evaluation set. This teacher-guided score is fused with a Gaussian-process surrogate to select candidates for full evaluation. For a fixed candidate population, we analyse evaluation variance, score concentration, pairwise rank inversion, expected Kendall-$\tau$, first-front identification, and hypervolume perturbation. We also derive a variance-aware fusion weight and a capacity-adaptive distillation rule. On keyword spotting and bird-call classification, the measured Kendall-$\tau$ values are 0.74 and 0.62, exceeding the corresponding predicted lower bounds of 0.60 and 0.46. Joint stratification reduces proxy-score variance by 41% relative to random evaluation. Selective teacher mismatch, in contrast, increases differential bias and reduces Kendall-$\tau$ to 0.41. Under a constrained evaluation budget, TGL-NSGA-II achieves the largest mean hypervolume and smallest generational distance on keyword spotting, records the lowest mean false-positive rate on BirdCLEF, and runs 2.2x faster than full NSGA-II. These guarantees apply to population-level low-fidelity evaluation and do not establish convergence of the complete evolutionary trajectory.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2609.30553 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.30553v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30553 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 330 words
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