NN-Former: Rethinking Graph Structure in Neural Architecture Representation

Ruihan Xu, Haokui Zhang, Yaowei Wang, Wei Zeng, Shiliang Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025, pp. 10004-10014

The growing use of deep learning necessitates efficient network design and deployment, making neural predictors vital for estimating attributes such as accuracy and latency. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and transformers have shown promising performance in representing neural architectures. However, each method has its disadvantages. GNNs lack the capabilities to represent complicated features, while transformers face poor generalization when the depth of architecture grows. To mitigate the above problems, we rethink neural architecture topology and show that sibling nodes are pivotal while overlooked in previous research. Thus we propose a novel predictor leveraging the strengths of GNNs and transformers to learn the enhanced topology. We introduce a novel token mixer that considers siblings, and a new channel mixer named bidirectional graph isomorphism feed-forward network. Our approach consistently achieves promising performance in both accuracy and latency prediction, providing valuable insights for learning Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) topology. The code is available at https://github.com/XuRuihan/NNFormer.