Awesome Transformer Architecture Search:

To keep track of the large number of recent papers that look at the intersection of Transformers and Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we have created this awesome list of curated papers and resources, inspired by awesome-autodl, awesome-architecture-search, and awesome-computer-vision. Papers are divided into the following categories:

1. General Transformer search
2. Domain Specific, applied Transformer search (divided into NLP, Vision, ASR)
3. Transformers Knowledge: Insights / Searchable parameters / Attention
4. Transformer Surveys
5. Foundation Models
6. Misc Resources

This repository is maintained by Yash Mehta, please feel free to reach out, create pull requests or open an issue to add papers. Please see this Google Doc for a comprehensive list of papers at ICML 2023 on foundation models/large language models.

General Transformer Search

Title	Venue	Group
Few-shot Task-agnostic Neural Architecture Search for Distilling Large Language Models	NeurIPS'22	MSR
Training Free Transformer Architecture Search	CVPR'22	Tencent & Xiamen University
LiteTransformerSearch: Training-free On-device Search for Efficient Autoregressive Language Models	AutoML Conference 2022 Workshop Track	MSR
Searching the Search Space of Vision Transformer	NeurIPS'21	MSRA, Stony Brook University
UniNet: Unified Architecture Search with Convolutions, Transformer and MLP	ECCV'22	SenseTime
Analyzing and Mitigating Interference in Neural Architecture Search	ICML'22	Tsinghua, MSR
BossNAS: Exploring Hybrid CNN-transformers with Block-wisely Self-supervised Neural Architecture Search	ICCV'21	Sun Yat-sen University
Memory-Efficient Differentiable Transformer Architecture Search	ACL-IJCNLP'21	MSR, Peking University
Finding Fast Transformers: One-Shot Neural Architecture Search by Component Composition	arxiv [Aug'20]	Google Research
AutoTrans: Automating Transformer Design via Reinforced Architecture Search	NLPCC'21	Fudan University
NASABN: A Neural Architecture Search Framework for Attention-Based Networks	IJCNN'20	Chinese Academy of Sciences
NAT: Neural Architecture Transformer for Accurate and Compact Architectures	NeurIPS'19	Tencent AI
The Evolved Transformer	ICML'19	Google Brain

Domain Specific Transformer Search

Vision

Title	Venue	Group
𝛼NAS: Neural Architecture Search using Property Guided Synthesis	ACM Programming Languages'22	MIT, Google
NASViT: Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Vision Transformers with Gradient Conflict aware Supernet Training	ICLR'22	Meta Reality Labs
AutoFormer: Searching Transformers for Visual Recognition	ICCV'21	MSR
GLiT: Neural Architecture Search for Global and Local Image Transformer	ICCV'21	University of Sydney
Searching for Efficient Multi-Stage Vision Transformers	ICCV'21 workshop	MIT
HR-NAS: Searching Efficient High-Resolution Neural Architectures with Lightweight Transformers	CVPR'21	Bytedance Inc.

Natural Language Processing

Title	Venue	Group
AutoBERT-Zero: Evolving the BERT backbone from scratch	AAAI'22	Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab
Primer: Searching for Efficient Transformers for Language Modeling	NeurIPS'21	Google
AutoTinyBERT: Automatic Hyper-parameter Optimization for Efficient Pre-trained Language Models	ACL'21	Tsinghua, Huawei Naoh's Ark
NAS-BERT: Task-Agnostic and Adaptive-Size BERT Compression with Neural Architecture Search	KDD'21	MSR, Tsinghua University
HAT: Hardware-Aware Transformers for Efficient Natural Language Processing	ACL'20	MIT

Automatic Speech Recognition

Title	Venue	Group
SFA: Searching faster architectures for end-to-end automatic speech recognition models	Computer Speech and Language'23	Chinese Academy of Sciences
LightSpeech: Lightweight and Fast Text to Speech with Neural Architecture Search	ICASSP'21	MSR
Efficient Gradient-Based Neural Architecture Search For End-to-End ASR	ICMI-MLMI'21	NPU, Xi'an
Evolved Speech-Transformer: Applying Neural Architecture Search to End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition	INTERSPEECH'20	VUNO Inc.

Transformers Knowledge: Insights, Searchable parameters, Attention

Title	Venue	Group
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era	arxiv [May'23]	EleutherAI
Patches are All You Need ?	TMLR'23	CMU
Seperable Self Attention for Mobile Vision Transformers	TMLR'23	Apple
Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Vision Transformers	AAAI'23	MSR & UCSC
EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed	NeurIPS'22	Snap Inc
Neighborhood Attention Transformer	CVPR'23	Meta AI
Training Compute Optimal Large Language Models	NeurIPS'22	DeepMind
CMT: Convolutional Neural Networks meet Vision Transformers	CVPR'22	Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab
Patch Slimming for Efficient Vision Transformers	CVPR'22	Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab
Lite Vision Transformer with Enhanced Self-Attention	CVPR'22	Johns Hopkins University, Adobe
TubeDETR: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding with Transformers	CVPR'22 (Oral)	CNRS & Inria
Beyond Fixation: Dynamic Window Visual Transformer	CVPR'22	UT Sydney & RMIT University
BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers	ICLR'22 (Oral)	MSR
How Do Vision Transformers Work?	ICLR'22 (Spotlight)	NAVER AI
Scale Efficiently: Insights from Pretraining and FineTuning Transformers	ICLR'22	Google Research
Tuformer: Data-Driven Design of Expressive Transformer by Tucker Tensor Representation	ICLR'22	UoMaryland
DictFormer: Tiny Transformer with Shared Dictionary	ICLR'22	Samsung Research
QuadTree Attention for Vision Transformers	ICLR'22	Alibaba AI Lab
Expediting Vision Transformers via Token Reorganization	ICLR'22 (Spotlight)	UC San Diego & Tencent AI Lab
UniFormer: Unified Transformer for Efficient Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning	ICLR'22	SIAT-SenseTime
Hierarchical Transformers Are More Efficient Language Models	NAACL'22	Google Research, UoWarsaw
Transformer in Transformer	NeurIPS'21	Huawei Noah's Ark
Long-Short Transformer: Efficient Transformers for Language and Vision	NeurIPS'21	NVIDIA
Memory-efficient Transformers via Top-k Attention	EMNLP Workshop '21	Allen AI
Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows	ICCV'21 best paper	MSR
Rethinking Spatial Dimensions of Vision Transformers	ICCV'21	NAVER AI
What makes for hierarchical vision transformers	arxiv [Sept'21]	HUST
AutoAttend: Automated Attention Representation Search	ICML'21	Tsinghua University
Rethinking Attention with Performers	ICLR'21 Oral	Google
LambdaNetworks: Modeling long-range Interactions without Attention	ICLR'21	Google Research
HyperGrid Transformers	ICLR'21	Google Research
LocalViT: Bringing Locality to Vision Transformers	arxiv [April'21]	ETH Zurich
Compressive Transformers for Long Range Sequence Modelling	ICLR'20	DeepMind
Improving Transformer Models by Reordering their Sublayers	ACL'20	FAIR, Allen AI
Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned	ACL'19	Yandex

Transformer Surveys

Title	Venue	Group
Transformers in Vision: A Survey	ACM Computing Surveys'22	MBZ University of AI
A Survey of Vision Transformers	TPAMI'22	CAS
Efficient Transformers: A Survey	ACM Computing Surveys'22	Google Research
Neural Architecture Search for Transformers: A Survey	IEEE xplore [Sep'22]	Iowa State Uni

Foundation Models

Title	Venue	Group
Neural Architecture Search for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning of Large Pre-trained Language Models	arxiv'23	Amazon Alexa AI

Misc resources

• Awesome Visual Transformer
• Vision Transformer & Attention Awesome List