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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recent advances in neural architecture search (NAS) demand tremendous computational resources, which makes it difficult to reproduce experiments and imposes a barrier-to-entry to researchers without access to large-scale computation. We aim to ameliorate these problems by introducing NAS-Bench-101, the first public architecture dataset for NAS research. To build NAS-Bench-101, we carefully constructed a compact, yet expressive, search space, exploiting graph isomorphisms to identify 423k unique convolutional architectures. We trained and evaluated all of these architectures multiple times on CIFAR-10 and compiled the results into a large dataset of over 5 million trained models. This allows researchers to evaluate the quality of a diverse range of models in milliseconds by querying the precomputed dataset. We demonstrate its utility by analyzing the dataset as a whole and by benchmarking a range of architecture optimization algorithms.

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).

神经体系结构搜索（NAS）是自动化有效图像处理DNN设计的强大工具。该排名已被倡导为NAS设计有效的性能预测指标。先前的对比方法通过比较架构对并预测其相对性能来解决排名问题。但是，它仅关注两个相关建筑之间的排名，而忽略了搜索空间的整体质量分布，这可能会遇到概括性问题。提出了一个预测因子，即专注于特定体系结构的全球质量层的神经体系结构排名，以解决由当地观点引起的此类问题。 NAR在全球范围内探索搜索空间的质量层，并根据其全球排名将每个人分类为他们所属的层。因此，预测变量获得了搜索空间的性能分布的知识，这有助于更轻松地将其排名能力推广到数据集。同时，全球质量分布通过根据质量层的统计数据直接对候选者进行采样，从而促进了搜索阶段，而质量层的统计数据没有培训搜索算法，例如增强型学习（RL）或进化算法（EA），因此简化了NAS管道并保存计算开销。拟议的NAR比在两个广泛使用的NAS研究数据集上的最先进方法取得了更好的性能。在NAS-Bench-101的庞大搜索空间中，NAR可以轻松地找到具有最高0.01 $ \ unicode {x2030} $ performance的架构。它还可以很好地概括为NAS Bench-201的不同图像数据集，即CIFAR-10，CIFAR-100和Imagenet-16-120，通过识别每个它们的最佳体系结构。

神经体系结构搜索（NAS）最近在深度学习社区中变得越来越流行，主要是因为它可以提供一个机会，使感兴趣的用户没有丰富的专业知识，从而从深度神经网络（DNNS）的成功中受益。但是，NAS仍然很费力且耗时，因为在NAS的搜索过程中需要进行大量的性能估计，并且训练DNNS在计算上是密集的。为了解决NAS的主要局限性，提高NAS的效率对于NAS的设计至关重要。本文以简要介绍了NAS的一般框架。然后，系统地讨论了根据代理指标评估网络候选者的方法。接下来是对替代辅助NAS的描述，该NAS分为三个不同类别，即NAS的贝叶斯优化，NAS的替代辅助进化算法和NAS的MOP。最后，讨论了剩余的挑战和开放研究问题，并在这个新兴领域提出了有希望的研究主题。

神经结构中的标准范例（NAS）是搜索具有特定操作和连接的完全确定性体系结构。在这项工作中，我们建议寻找最佳运行分布，从而提供了一种随机和近似解，可用于采样任意长度的架构。我们提出并显示，给定架构单元格，其性能主要取决于使用的操作的比率，而不是典型的搜索空间中的任何特定连接模式;也就是说，操作排序的小变化通常是无关紧要的。这种直觉与任何特定的搜索策略都具有正交，并且可以应用于多样化的NAS算法。通过对4数据集和4个NAS技术的广泛验证（贝叶斯优化，可分辨率搜索，本地搜索和随机搜索），我们表明操作分布（1）保持足够的辨别力来可靠地识别解决方案，并且（2）显着识别比传统的编码更容易优化，导致大量速度，几乎没有成本性能。实际上，这种简单的直觉显着降低了电流方法的成本，并可能使NAS用于更广泛的应用中。

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。

Recently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has successfully identified neural network architectures that exceed human designed ones on large-scale image classification. In this paper, we study NAS for semantic image segmentation. Existing works often focus on searching the repeatable cell structure, while hand-designing the outer network structure that controls the spatial resolution changes. This choice simplifies the search space, but becomes increasingly problematic for dense image prediction which exhibits a lot more network level architectural variations. Therefore, we propose to search the network level structure in addition to the cell level structure, which forms a hierarchical architecture search space. We present a network level search space that includes many popular designs, and develop a formulation that allows efficient gradient-based architecture search (3 P100 GPU days on Cityscapes images). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the challenging Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC 2012, and ADE20K datasets. Auto-DeepLab, our architecture searched specifically for semantic image segmentation, attains state-of-the-art performance without any ImageNet pretraining. 1 * Work done while an intern at Google.

The effort devoted to hand-crafting neural network image classifiers has motivated the use of architecture search to discover them automatically. Although evolutionary algorithms have been repeatedly applied to neural network topologies, the image classifiers thus discovered have remained inferior to human-crafted ones. Here, we evolve an image classifier-AmoebaNet-A-that surpasses hand-designs for the first time.To do this, we modify the tournament selection evolutionary algorithm by introducing an age property to favor the younger genotypes. Matching size, AmoebaNet-A has comparable accuracy to current state-of-the-art ImageNet models discovered with more complex architecture-search methods. Scaled to larger size, AmoebaNet-A sets a new state-of-theart 83.9% top-1 / 96.6% top-5 ImageNet accuracy. In a controlled comparison against a well known reinforcement learning algorithm, we give evidence that evolution can obtain results faster with the same hardware, especially at the earlier stages of the search. This is relevant when fewer compute resources are available. Evolution is, thus, a simple method to effectively discover high-quality architectures. Related WorkReview papers provide informative surveys of earlier [18,49] and more recent [15] literature on image classifier architecture search, including successful RL studies [2,6,29,[52][53][54] and evolutionary studies like those mentioned in 1 After our submission, a recent preprint has further scaled up and retrained AmoebaNet-A to reach 84.3% top-1 / 97.0% top-5 ImageNet accuracy [25].

深度学习技术在各种任务中都表现出了出色的有效性，并且深度学习具有推进多种应用程序（包括在边缘计算中）的潜力，其中将深层模型部署在边缘设备上，以实现即时的数据处理和响应。一个关键的挑战是，虽然深层模型的应用通常会产生大量的内存和计算成本，但Edge设备通常只提供非常有限的存储和计算功能，这些功能可能会在各个设备之间差异很大。这些特征使得难以构建深度学习解决方案，以释放边缘设备的潜力，同时遵守其约束。应对这一挑战的一种有希望的方法是自动化有效的深度学习模型的设计，这些模型轻巧，仅需少量存储，并且仅产生低计算开销。该调查提供了针对边缘计算的深度学习模型设计自动化技术的全面覆盖。它提供了关键指标的概述和比较，这些指标通常用于量化模型在有效性，轻度和计算成本方面的水平。然后，该调查涵盖了深层设计自动化技术的三类最新技术：自动化神经体系结构搜索，自动化模型压缩以及联合自动化设计和压缩。最后，调查涵盖了未来研究的开放问题和方向。

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.

Current state-of-the-art convolutional architectures for object detection are manually designed. Here we aim to learn a better architecture of feature pyramid network for object detection. We adopt Neural Architecture Search and discover a new feature pyramid architecture in a novel scalable search space covering all cross-scale connections. The discovered architecture, named NAS-FPN, consists of a combination of top-down and bottom-up connections to fuse features across scales. NAS-FPN, combined with various backbone models in the RetinaNet framework, achieves better accuracy and latency tradeoff compared to state-ofthe-art object detection models. NAS-FPN improves mobile detection accuracy by 2 AP compared to state-of-the-art SS-DLite with MobileNetV2 model in [32] and achieves 48.3 AP which surpasses Mask R-CNN [10] detection accuracy with less computation time.