%0 Journal Article %@ 0885-6125 %A Lopes, Vasco %A Carlucci, Fabio Maria %A Esperanca, Pedro M %A Singh, Marco %A Yang, Antoine %A Gabillon, Victor %A Xu, Hang %A Chen, Zewei %A Wang, Jun %D 2024 %F discovery:10194864 %I Springer Verlag %J Machine Learning %K AutoML, Computer Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer vision, Multi arm bandits, Neural architecture search, Object recognition, Science & Technology, Technology %N 1 %P 73-96 %T Manas: multi-agent neural architecture search %U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10194864/ %V 113 %X The Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem is typically formulated as a graph search problem where the goal is to learn the optimal operations over edges in order to maximize a graph-level global objective. Due to the large architecture parameter space, efficiency is a key bottleneck preventing NAS from its practical use. In this work, we address the issue by framing NAS as a multi-agent problem where agents control a subset of the network and coordinate to reach optimal architectures. We provide two distinct lightweight implementations, with reduced memory requirements (1/8th of state-of-the-art), and performances above those of much more computationally expensive methods. Theoretically, we demonstrate vanishing regrets of the form O(T) , with T being the total number of rounds. Finally, we perform experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, and aware that random search and random sampling are (often ignored) effective baselines, we conducted additional experiments on 3 alternative datasets, with complexity constraints, and 2 network configurations, and achieve competitive results in comparison with the baselines and other methods. %Z This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.