Artificial Bee Colony

Transformer-guided swarm intelligence framework for low-resource neural architecture search

A new arXiv preprint proposes a hybrid NAS framework combining an autoregressive Transformer controller trained via reinforcement learning with an Artificial Bee Colony metaheuristic for local search. The system targets consumer-grade hardware (NVIDIA RTX 3060), completing architecture search in ~3 hours and finding compact models: 84.85% on CIFAR-10 with ~174K parameters and F1=0.71 on fraud detection with ~4,600 parameters. A dynamic entropy mechanism is introduced to prevent premature convergence during RL training. The work addresses the democratization angle of NAS, positioning results as suitable for edge deployment.