# Single-Path NAS: Device-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design

Source: [Single-Path NAS: Device-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa65bb1e209131cea0be94>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T05:57:48.173Z

Authors: Dimitrios Stamoulis, Ruizhou Ding, Di Wang, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Bodhi Priyantha, Jie Liu, Diana Marculescu

Published: 2019-05-10T13:23:48.000Z

## Abstract

Can we automatically design a Convolutional Network (ConvNet) with the highest image classification accuracy under the latency constraint of a mobile device? Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for ConvNet design is a challenging problem due to the combinatorially large design space and search time (at least 200 GPU-hours). To alleviate this complexity, we propose Single-Path NAS, a novel differentiable NAS method for designing device-efficient ConvNets in less than 4 hours. 1. Novel NAS formulation: our method introduces a single-path, over-parameterized ConvNet to encode all architectural decisions with shared convolutional kernel parameters. 2. NAS efficiency: Our method decreases the NAS search cost down to 8 epochs (30 TPU-hours), i.e., up to 5,000x faster compared to prior work. 3. On-device image classification: Single-Path NAS achieves 74.96% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 79ms inference latency on a Pixel 1 phone, which is state-of-the-art accuracy compared to NAS methods with similar latency (\<80ms).

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.04159>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.04159.pdf>)
