FINNAS: FINN-Guided Hardware-Aware NAS and Pruning for FPGA Jet Substructure Classification

Abstract

FPGAs are well suited to deploying quantised neural networks (QNNs) under strict accuracy, latency, and resource constraints; however, identifying efficient model-accelerator combinations commonly requires extensive manual design-space exploration and repeated hardware synthesis. This paper presents FINNAS, a FINN-guided hardware-aware evolutionary neural architecture search framework. FINNAS jointly searches quantised MLP depth, width, and global precision settings, and ranks candidates using proxy validation accuracy together with FINN-estimated LUT usage and latency under a fully parallel mapping. Selected finalists are fully retrained, subjected to post-search unstructured pruning, and validated using RTL simulation and Vivado out-of-context synthesis. On the CERNBox jet substructure classification task, the searched implementations expose competitive accuracy-resource trade-offs. Compared with a manually optimised dense FINN accelerator, a compact FINNAS design improves accuracy from 73.78\% to 74.36\%, while reducing LUT usage by \(8.5\times\) and RTL-simulation latency by \(1.77\times\). Unstructured pruning further provides consistent LUT and FF reductions across the fully parallel finalists.