  In prediction-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS), performance indicators
derived from graph convolutional networks have shown remarkable success. These
indicators, achieved by representing feed-forward structures as component
graphs through one-hot encoding, face a limitation: their inability to evaluate
architecture performance across varying search spaces. In contrast, handcrafted
performance indicators (zero-shot NAS), which use the same architecture with
random initialization, can generalize across multiple search spaces. Addressing
this limitation, we propose a novel approach for zero-shot NAS using deep
learning. Our method employs Fourier sum of sines encoding for convolutional
kernels, enabling the construction of a computational feed-forward graph with a
structure similar to the architecture under evaluation. These encodings are
learnable and offer a comprehensive view of the architecture's topological
information. An accompanying multi-layer perceptron (MLP) then ranks these
architectures based on their encodings. Experimental results show that our
approach surpasses previous methods using graph convolutional networks in terms
of correlation on the NAS-Bench-201 dataset and exhibits a higher convergence
rate. Moreover, our extracted feature representation trained on each NAS
benchmark is transferable to other NAS benchmarks, showing promising
generalizability across multiple search spaces. The code is available at:
https://github.com/minh1409/DFT-NPZS-NAS
