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 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.