Speaker
Description
We develop an automated pipeline to streamline neural architecture codesign for physics applications, to reduce the need for ML expertise when designing models for a novel task. Our method employs a two-stage neural architecture search (NAS) design to enhance these models, including hardware costs, leading to the discovery of more hardware-efficient neural architectures. The global search stage explores a wide range of architectures within a flexible and modular search space to identify promising candidate architectures. The local search stage further fine-tunes hyperparameters and applies compression techniques such as quantization aware training (QAT) and network pruning. We synthesize the optimal models to high level synthesis code for FPGA deployment with the hls4ml library. Additionally, our hierarchical search space provides greater flexibility in optimization, which can easily extend to other tasks and domains. We demonstrate this with two case studies: Bragg peak finding in materials science and jet classification in high energy physics.
