UniCoS: A Unified Neural and Accelerator Co-Search Framework for CNNs and ViTs

Current algorithm-hardware co-search works often suffer from lengthy training times and inadequate exploration of hardware design spaces, leading to suboptimal performance. This work introduces UniCoS, a unified framework for co-optimizing neural networks and accelerators for CNNs and Vision Transfo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2025 62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) pp. 1 - 6
Main Authors: Fu, Wei, Lou, Wenqi, Tang, Cheng, Wen, Hongbing, Qin, Yunji, Gong, Lei, Wang, Chao, Zhou, Xuehai
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 22.06.2025
Subjects:
Accuracy
Computer architecture
Design automation
Hardware acceleration
hardware software co-exploration
heterogeneous multi-core architecture
Navigation
Neural networks
Software
Space exploration
Training
Transformers
zero-shot proxy
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Summary:Current algorithm-hardware co-search works often suffer from lengthy training times and inadequate exploration of hardware design spaces, leading to suboptimal performance. This work introduces UniCoS, a unified framework for co-optimizing neural networks and accelerators for CNNs and Vision Transformers (ViTs). By introducing a novel training-free proxy that evaluates accuracy within seconds and a clustering-based algorithm for exploring heterogeneous dataflows, UniCoS efficiently navigates the design spaces of both architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that the solutions generated by UniCoS consistently surpass state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g., 3.54 \times energy-delay product (EDP) improvement with a 1.76 \% higher accuracy on ImageNet) while requiring notably reduced search time (up to 48 \times, \sim 3 hours). The code is available at https://github.com/mine7777/Unicos.git.
DOI:10.1109/DAC63849.2025.11133418