  Neural predictors have shown great potential in the evaluation process of
neural architecture search (NAS). However, current predictor-based approaches
overlook the fact that training a predictor necessitates a considerable number
of trained neural networks as the labeled training set, which is costly to
obtain. Therefore, the critical issue in utilizing predictors for NAS is to
train a high-performance predictor using as few trained neural networks as
possible. Although some methods attempt to address this problem through
unsupervised learning, they often result in inaccurate predictions. We argue
that the unsupervised tasks intended for the common graph data are too
challenging for neural networks, causing unsupervised training to be
susceptible to performance crashes in NAS. To address this issue, we propose a
Curricumum-guided Contrastive Learning framework for neural Predictor (DCLP).
Our method simplifies the contrastive task by designing a novel curriculum to
enhance the stability of unlabeled training data distribution during
contrastive training. Specifically, we propose a scheduler that ranks the
training data according to the contrastive difficulty of each data and then
inputs them to the contrastive learner in order. This approach concentrates the
training data distribution and makes contrastive training more efficient. By
using our method, the contrastive learner incrementally learns feature
representations via unsupervised data on a smooth learning curve, avoiding
performance crashes that may occur with excessively variable training data
distributions. We experimentally demonstrate that DCLP has high accuracy and
efficiency compared with existing predictors, and shows promising potential to
discover superior architectures in various search spaces when combined with
search strategies. Our code is available at:
https://github.com/Zhengsh123/DCLP.
