HARNAS: Neural Architecture Search Jointly Optimizing for Hardware Efficiency and Adversarial Robustness of Convolutional and Capsule Networks

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methodologies aim at finding efficient Deep Neural Network (DNN) models for a given application under given system constraints. DNNs are compute-intensive as well as vulnerable to adversarial attack threats. To address multiple design objectives, we propose HARNAS, a novel NAS framework that jointly optimizes for hardware-efficiency and adversarial-robustness of DNNs executed on specialized hardware accelerators. Besides the traditional convolutional DNNs, HARNAS extends the search for complex types of DNNs such as Capsule Networks. For reducing the exploration time, HARNAS selects appropriate values of adversarial perturbations to employ in the NAS algorithm. Our evaluations provide a set of Pareto-optimal solutions leveraging the tradeoffs between the above-discussed design objectives.