  Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an automated architecture engineering
method for deep learning design automation, which serves as an alternative to
the manual and error-prone process of model development, selection, evaluation
and performance estimation. However, one major obstacle of NAS is the extremely
demanding computation resource requirements and time-consuming iterations
particularly when the dataset scales. In this paper, targeting at the emerging
vision transformer (ViT), we present NasHD, a hyperdimensional computing based
supervised learning model to rank the performance given the architectures and
configurations. Different from other learning based methods, NasHD is faster
thanks to the high parallel processing of HDC architecture. We also evaluated
two HDC encoding schemes: Gram-based and Record-based of NasHD on their
performance and efficiency. On the VIMER-UFO benchmark dataset of 8
applications from a diverse range of domains, NasHD Record can rank the
performance of nearly 100K vision transformer models with about 1 minute while
still achieving comparable results with sophisticated models.
