We propose Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), a fast and inexpensive approach for automatic model design. In ENAS, a controller discovers neural network architectures by searching for an optimal subgraph within a large computational graph. The controller is trained with policy gradient to select a subgraph that maximizes the expected reward on a validation set. Meanwhile the model corresponding to the selected subgraph is trained to minimize a canonical cross entropy loss. Sharing parameters among child models allows ENAS to deliver strong empirical performances, while using much fewer GPUhours than existing automatic model design approaches, and notably, 1000x less expensive than standard Neural Architecture Search. On the Penn Treebank dataset, ENAS discovers a novel architecture that achieves a test perplexity of 55.8, establishing a new state-of-the-art among all methods without post-training processing. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, ENAS finds a novel architecture that achieves 2.89% test error, which is on par with the 2.65% test error of NAS-Net (Zoph et al., 2018).

We propose Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), a fast and inexpensive approach for automatic model design. ENAS constructs a large computational graph, where each subgraph represents a neural network architecture, hence forcing all architectures to share their parameters. A controller is trained with policy gradient to search for a subgraph that maximizes the expected reward on a validation set. Meanwhile a model corresponding to the selected subgraph is trained to minimize a canonical cross entropy loss. Sharing parameters among child models allows ENAS to deliver strong empirical performances, whilst using much fewer GPU-hours than existing automatic model design approaches, and notably, 1000x less expensive than standard Neural Architecture Search. On Penn Treebank, ENAS discovers a novel architecture that achieves a test perplexity of 56.3, on par with the existing state-of-the-art among all methods without post-training processing. On CIFAR-10, ENAS finds a novel architecture that achieves 2.89% test error, which is on par with the 2.65% test error of NASNet (Zoph et al., 2018).

Conventional neural architecture search (NAS) approaches are based on reinforcement learning or evolutionary strategy, which take more than 3000 GPU hours to find a good model on CIFAR-10. We propose an efficient NAS approach learning to search by gradient descent. Our approach represents the search space as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This DAG contains billions of sub-graphs, each of which indicates a kind of neural architecture. To avoid traversing all the possibilities of the sub-graphs, we develop a differentiable sampler over the DAG. This sampler is learnable and optimized by the validation loss after training the sampled architecture. In this way, our approach can be trained in an end-to-end fashion by gradient descent, named Gradient-based search using Differentiable Architecture Sampler (GDAS). In experiments, we can finish one searching procedure in four GPU hours on CIFAR-10, and the discovered model obtains a test error of 2.82% with only 2.5M parameters, which is on par with the state-of-the-art. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/D-X-Y/NAS-Projects.

This paper addresses the scalability challenge of architecture search by formulating the task in a differentiable manner. Unlike conventional approaches of applying evolution or reinforcement learning over a discrete and non-differentiable search space, our method is based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture representation, allowing efficient search of the architecture using gradient descent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 show that our algorithm excels in discovering high-performance convolutional architectures for image classification and recurrent architectures for language modeling, while being orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art non-differentiable techniques. Our implementation has been made publicly available to facilitate further research on efficient architecture search algorithms.

Neural architecture search (NAS) is a promising research direction that has the potential to replace expert-designed networks with learned, task-specific architectures. In this work, in order to help ground the empirical results in this field, we propose new NAS baselines that build off the following observations: (i) NAS is a specialized hyperparameter optimization problem; and (ii) random search is a competitive baseline for hyperparameter optimization. Leveraging these observations, we evaluate both random search with early-stopping and a novel random search with weight-sharing algorithm on two standard NAS benchmarks-PTB and CIFAR-10. Our results show that random search with early-stopping is a competitive NAS baseline, e.g., it performs at least as well as ENAS [41], a leading NAS method, on both benchmarks. Additionally, random search with weight-sharing outperforms random search with early-stopping, achieving a state-of-the-art NAS result on PTB and a highly competitive result on CIFAR-10. Finally, we explore the existing reproducibility issues of published NAS results. We note the lack of source material needed to exactly reproduce these results, and further discuss the robustness of published results given the various sources of variability in NAS experimental setups. Relatedly, we provide all information (code, random seeds, documentation) needed to exactly reproduce our results, and report our random search with weight-sharing results for each benchmark on multiple runs.

Deep Learning has enabled remarkable progress over the last years on a variety of tasks, such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. One crucial aspect for this progress are novel neural architectures. Currently employed architectures have mostly been developed manually by human experts, which is a time-consuming and errorprone process. Because of this, there is growing interest in automated neural architecture search methods. We provide an overview of existing work in this field of research and categorize them according to three dimensions: search space, search strategy, and performance estimation strategy.

There is growing interest in automating neural network architecture design. Existing architecture search methods can be computationally expensive, requiring thousands of different architectures to be trained from scratch. Recent work has explored weight sharing across models to amortize the cost of training. Although previous methods reduced the cost of architecture search by orders of magnitude, they remain complex, requiring hypernetworks or reinforcement learning controllers. We aim to understand weight sharing for one-shot architecture search. With careful experimental analysis, we show that it is possible to efficiently identify promising architectures from a complex search space without either hypernetworks or RL.

We propose a new method for learning the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that is more efficient than recent state-of-the-art methods based on reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms. Our approach uses a sequential model-based optimization (SMBO) strategy, in which we search for structures in order of increasing complexity, while simultaneously learning a surrogate model to guide the search through structure space. Direct comparison under the same search space shows that our method is up to 5 times more efficient than the RL method of Zoph et al. (2018) in terms of number of models evaluated, and 8 times faster in terms of total compute. The structures we discover in this way achieve state of the art classification accuracies on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.

Developing neural network image classification models often requires significant architecture engineering. In this paper, we study a method to learn the model architectures directly on the dataset of interest. As this approach is expensive when the dataset is large, we propose to search for an architectural building block on a small dataset and then transfer the block to a larger dataset. The key contribution of this work is the design of a new search space (which we call the "NASNet search space") which enables transferability. In our experiments, we search for the best convolutional layer (or "cell") on the CIFAR-10 dataset and then apply this cell to the ImageNet dataset by stacking together more copies of this cell, each with their own parameters to design a convolutional architecture, which we name a "NASNet architecture". We also introduce a new regularization technique called ScheduledDropPath that significantly improves generalization in the NASNet models. On CIFAR-10 itself, a NASNet found by our method achieves 2.4% error rate, which is state-of-the-art. Although the cell is not searched for directly on ImageNet, a NASNet constructed from the best cell achieves, among the published works, state-of-the-art accuracy of 82.7% top-1 and 96.2% top-5 on ImageNet. Our model is 1.2% better in top-1 accuracy than the best human-invented architectures while having 9 billion fewer FLOPS -a reduction of 28% in computational demand from the previous state-of-the-art model. When evaluated at different levels of computational cost, accuracies of NASNets exceed those of the state-of-the-art human-designed models. For instance, a small version of NASNet also achieves 74% top-1 accuracy, which is 3.1% better than equivalently-sized, state-of-the-art models for mobile platforms. Finally, the image features learned from image classification are generically useful and can be transferred to other computer vision problems. On the task of object detection, the learned features by NASNet used with the Faster-RCNN framework surpass state-of-the-art by 4.0% achieving 43.1% mAP on the COCO dataset.

Neural architectures can be naturally viewed as computational graphs. Motivated by this perspective, we, in this paper, study neural architecture search (NAS) through the lens of learning random graph models. In contrast to existing NAS methods which largely focus on searching for a single best architecture, i.e, point estimation, we propose GraphPNAS a deep graph generative model that learns a distribution of well-performing architectures. Relying on graph neural networks (GNNs), our GraphPNAS can better capture topologies of good neural architectures and relations between operators therein. Moreover, our graph generator leads to a learnable probabilistic search method that is more flexible and efficient than the commonly used RNN generator and random search methods. Finally, we learn our generator via an efficient reinforcement learning formulation for NAS. To assess the effectiveness of our GraphPNAS, we conduct extensive experiments on three search spaces, including the challenging RandWire on TinyImageNet, ENAS on CIFAR10, and NAS-Bench-101/201. The complexity of RandWire is significantly larger than other search spaces in the literature. We show that our proposed graph generator consistently outperforms RNN-based one and achieves better or comparable performances than state-of-the-art NAS methods.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has a great impact by automatically designing effective neural network architectures. However, the prohibitive computational demand of conventional NAS algorithms (e.g. 10 4 GPU hours) makes it difficult to directly search the architectures on large-scale tasks (e.g. ImageNet). Differentiable NAS can reduce the cost of GPU hours via a continuous representation of network architecture but suffers from the high GPU memory consumption issue (grow linearly w.r.t. candidate set size). As a result, they need to utilize proxy tasks, such as training on a smaller dataset, or learning with only a few blocks, or training just for a few epochs. These architectures optimized on proxy tasks are not guaranteed to be optimal on the target task. In this paper, we present ProxylessNAS that can directly learn the architectures for large-scale target tasks and target hardware platforms. We address the high memory consumption issue of differentiable NAS and reduce the computational cost (GPU hours and GPU memory) to the same level of regular training while still allowing a large candidate set. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of directness and specialization. On CIFAR-10, our model achieves 2.08% test error with only 5.7M parameters, better than the previous state-of-the-art architecture AmoebaNet-B, while using 6× fewer parameters. On ImageNet, our model achieves 3.1% better top-1 accuracy than MobileNetV2, while being 1.2× faster with measured GPU latency. We also apply ProxylessNAS to specialize neural architectures for hardware with direct hardware metrics (e.g. latency) and provide insights for efficient CNN architecture design. 1

在NAS领域中，可分构造的架构搜索是普遍存在的，因为它的简单性和效率，其中两个范例，多路径算法和单路径方法主导。多路径框架（例如，DARTS）是直观的，但遭受内存使用和培训崩溃。单路径方法（例如，e.g.gdas和proxylesnnas）减轻了内存问题并缩小了搜索和评估之间的差距，但牺牲了性能。在本文中，我们提出了一种概念上简单的且有效的方法来桥接这两个范式，称为相互意识的子图可差架构搜索（MSG-DAS）。我们框架的核心是一个可分辨动的Gumbel-Topk采样器，它产生多个互斥的单路径子图。为了缓解多个子图形设置所带来的Severer Skip-Connect问题，我们提出了一个Dropblock-Identity模块来稳定优化。为了充分利用可用的型号（超级网和子图），我们介绍了一种记忆高效的超净指导蒸馏，以改善培训。所提出的框架击中了灵活的内存使用和搜索质量之间的平衡。我们展示了我们在想象中和CIFAR10上的方法的有效性，其中搜索的模型显示了与最近的方法相当的性能。

The automated machine learning (AutoML) field has become increasingly relevant in recent years. These algorithms can develop models without the need for expert knowledge, facilitating the application of machine learning techniques in the industry. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) exploits deep learning techniques to autonomously produce neural network architectures whose results rival the state-of-the-art models hand-crafted by AI experts. However, this approach requires significant computational resources and hardware investments, making it less appealing for real-usage applications. This article presents the third version of Pareto-Optimal Progressive Neural Architecture Search (POPNASv3), a new sequential model-based optimization NAS algorithm targeting different hardware environments and multiple classification tasks. Our method is able to find competitive architectures within large search spaces, while keeping a flexible structure and data processing pipeline to adapt to different tasks. The algorithm employs Pareto optimality to reduce the number of architectures sampled during the search, drastically improving the time efficiency without loss in accuracy. The experiments performed on images and time series classification datasets provide evidence that POPNASv3 can explore a large set of assorted operators and converge to optimal architectures suited for the type of data provided under different scenarios.

In this paper, we present a modified Xception architecture, the NEXcepTion network. Our network has significantly better performance than the original Xception, achieving top-1 accuracy of 81.5% on the ImageNet validation dataset (an improvement of 2.5%) as well as a 28% higher throughput. Another variant of our model, NEXcepTion-TP, reaches 81.8% top-1 accuracy, similar to ConvNeXt (82.1%), while having a 27% higher throughput. Our model is the result of applying improved training procedures and new design decisions combined with an application of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) on a smaller dataset. These findings call for revisiting older architectures and reassessing their potential when combined with the latest enhancements.

神经网络的推理通常是通过在边缘设备的资源（例如，计算能力，存储器，带宽）的限制。除了改善硬件设计和部署高效的机型，它可以聚集很多设备的计算能力，以使机器学习模型。在本文中，我们提议使用模型并行到分布式推理分离的神经网络的一个新方法。为了实现通信延迟，延迟计算和性能之间取得更好的平衡，我们采用神经结构搜索（NAS），以寻找最佳的传输策略，减少通信量。我们发现，最好的模式通过与基线相比，数据传输量的86.6％减少和多不影响性能。在设备和车型配置适当的规范，我们的实验显示，边缘集群大神经网络的推理可以分发和加速，它提供了智能应用在物联网（IOT）部署新的解决方案。

自动化机器学习（AUTOML）是使机器学习模型被广泛应用于解决现实世界问题的重要步骤。尽管有许多研究的进步，但机器学习方法主要由于其数据隐私和安全法规而尚未完全被行业利用，因此在中心位置存储和计算增加数据量的高成本以及最重要的是缺乏专业知识。因此，我们介绍了一个新颖的框架，hanf -$ \ textbf {h} $ yperparameter $ \ textbf {a} $ nd $ \ textbf {n} $ earural架构搜索$ \ textbf {f}为在几个数据所有者服务器上分布的数据建立一个自动框架，而无需将数据带到中心位置。 HANF使用基于梯度的神经体系结构搜索和数据分布式设置中分别使用基于梯度的神经体系结构搜索和$ n $ armed Bandit方法来共同优化学习算法的神经体系结构和非构造超参数。我们表明，HANF有效地找到了优化的神经体系结构，并在数据所有者服务器上调整了超参数。此外，HANF可以在联合和非填充设置中应用。从经验上讲，我们表明HANF使用图像分类任务收敛于合适的体系结构和非架构高参数集。

Automl的一个重要目标是自动化在探索域内的新任务上的神经网络设计。通过这一目标激励，我们研究了使用户能够发现来自其特定域的数据的正确神经操作的问题。我们介绍一个名为XD-Operation的搜索空间，这些操作模仿标准多通道卷曲的归纳偏差，同时更具表现力：我们证明它包括多个应用程序区域的许多命名操作。从Reset等任何标准骨干开始，我们展示了如何通过XD操作将其转换为搜索空间以及如何使用简单的权重共享方案遍历空间。在各种任务组合 - 求解PDES，距离蛋白质折叠和音乐建模的距离预测 - 我们的方法一致地产生比基线网络更低的误差的模型，并且通常更低的误差比专业设计的域特定方法更低。

可区分的架构搜索（飞镖）大大促进了NAS技术的发展，因为其搜索效率很高，但遭受了性能崩溃的影响。在本文中，我们努力从两个方面减轻飞镖的性能崩溃问题。首先，我们研究了飞镖中超级网的表达能力，然后仅使用训练batchnorm来得出新的飞镖范式设置。其次，从理论上讲，随机特征稀释了跳过连接在超网优化中的辅助连接作用，并使搜索算法专注于更公平的操作选择，从而解决了性能崩溃问题。我们具有随机功能的实例化飞镖和PC-Darts，分别为每个命名的RF-Darts和RF-PCDART构建一个改进的版本。实验结果表明，RF-darts在CIFAR-10上获得\ TextBf {94.36 \％}测试精度（这是NAS Bench-201的最接近最佳结果），并实现了最新的最新最先进的TOP-1从CIFAR-10传输时，ImageNet上\ TextBf {24.0 \％}的测试错误。此外，RF-DARTS在三个数据集（CIFAR-10，CIFAR-100和SVHN）和四个搜索空间（S1-S4）上进行稳健性能。此外，RF-PCDARTS在Imagenet上取得了更好的结果，即\ textbf {23.9 \％} top-1和\ textbf {7.1 \％} top-5 top-5测试错误，超越了代表性的方法，例如单路径，训练免费， ，直接在Imagenet上搜索部分通道范例。

神经结构搜索（NAS）的成功受到过度计算要求的限制。虽然现代重量共享NAS方法，例如飞镖在单位数GPU天中可以完成搜索，但从共享权重中提取最终的最佳架构是众所周知的不可靠性。培训 - 速度估计（TSE），最近开发的普遍开发的普遍估计，以贝叶斯边缘似然解释的用来代替飞镖基于梯度优化的验证损失。这可以防止飞镖跳过连接崩溃，这显着提高了NASBench-201和原始飞镖搜索空间的性能。我们通过应用各种飞镖诊断来扩展这些结果，并显示不使用验证集产生的几种不寻常的行为。此外，我们的实验产生了在与操作选择相比，尽管通常在文献中受到有限的关注，但仍会产生对搜索性能的强烈影响的深度间隙和拓扑选择的具体示例。

在最近，对表现良好的神经体系结构（NAS）的高效，自动化的搜索引起了人们的关注。因此，主要的研究目标是减少对神经体系结构进行昂贵评估的必要性，同时有效地探索大型搜索空间。为此，替代模型将体系结构嵌入了潜在的空间并预测其性能，而神经体系结构的生成模型则可以在生成器借鉴的潜在空间内基于优化的搜索。替代模型和生成模型都具有促进结构良好的潜在空间中的查询搜索。在本文中，我们通过利用有效的替代模型和生成设计的优势来进一步提高查询效率和有前途的建筑生成之间的权衡。为此，我们提出了一个与替代预测指标配对的生成模型，该模型迭代地学会了从越来越有希望的潜在子空间中生成样品。这种方法可导致非常有效和高效的架构搜索，同时保持查询量较低。此外，我们的方法允许以一种直接的方式共同优化准确性和硬件延迟等多个目标。我们展示了这种方法的好处，不仅是W.R.T.优化体系结构以提高最高分类精度，但在硬件约束和在单个NAS基准测试中的最新方法和多个目标的最先进方法的优化。我们还可以在Imagenet上实现最先进的性能。该代码可在http://github.com/jovitalukasik/ag-net上找到。