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].

Neural networks have proven effective at solving difficult problems but designing their architectures can be challenging, even for image classification problems alone. Our goal is to minimize human participation, so we employ evolutionary algorithms to discover such networks automatically. Despite significant computational requirements, we show that it is now possible to evolve models with accuracies within the range of those published in the last year. Specifically, we employ simple evolutionary techniques at unprecedented scales to discover models for the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, starting from trivial initial conditions and reaching accuracies of 94.6% (95.6% for ensemble) and 77.0%, respectively. To do this, we use novel and intuitive mutation operators that navigate large search spaces; we stress that no human participation is required once evolution starts and that the output is a fully-trained model. Throughout this work, we place special emphasis on the repeatability of results, the variability in the outcomes and the computational requirements.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

In the past few years, neural architecture search (NAS) has become an increasingly important tool within the deep learning community. Despite the many recent successes of NAS, however, most existing approaches operate within highly structured design spaces, and hence explore only a small fraction of the full search space of neural architectures while also requiring significant manual effort from domain experts. In this work, we develop techniques that enable efficient NAS in a significantly larger design space. To accomplish this, we propose to perform NAS in an abstract search space of program properties. Our key insights are as follows: (1) the abstract search space is significantly smaller than the original search space, and (2) architectures with similar program properties also have similar performance; thus, we can search more efficiently in the abstract search space. To enable this approach, we also propose a novel efficient synthesis procedure, which accepts a set of promising program properties, and returns a satisfying neural architecture. We implement our approach, $\alpha$NAS, within an evolutionary framework, where the mutations are guided by the program properties. Starting with a ResNet-34 model, $\alpha$NAS produces a model with slightly improved accuracy on CIFAR-10 but 96% fewer parameters. On ImageNet, $\alpha$NAS is able to improve over Vision Transformer (30% fewer FLOPS and parameters), ResNet-50 (23% fewer FLOPS, 14% fewer parameters), and EfficientNet (7% fewer FLOPS and parameters) without any degradation in accuracy.

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.

混合精确的深神经网络达到了硬件部署所需的能源效率和吞吐量，尤其是在资源有限的情况下，而无需牺牲准确性。但是，不容易找到保留精度的最佳每层钻头精度，尤其是在创建巨大搜索空间的大量模型，数据集和量化技术中。为了解决这一困难，最近出现了一系列文献，并且已经提出了一些实现有希望的准确性结果的框架。在本文中，我们首先总结了文献中通常使用的量化技术。然后，我们对混合精液框架进行了彻底的调查，该调查是根据其优化技术进行分类的，例如增强学习和量化技术，例如确定性舍入。此外，讨论了每个框架的优势和缺点，我们在其中呈现并列。我们最终为未来的混合精液框架提供了指南。

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。

大多数机器学习算法由一个或多个超参数配置，必须仔细选择并且通常会影响性能。为避免耗时和不可递销的手动试验和错误过程来查找性能良好的超参数配置，可以采用各种自动超参数优化（HPO）方法，例如，基于监督机器学习的重新采样误差估计。本文介绍了HPO后，本文审查了重要的HPO方法，如网格或随机搜索，进化算法，贝叶斯优化，超带和赛车。它给出了关于进行HPO的重要选择的实用建议，包括HPO算法本身，性能评估，如何将HPO与ML管道，运行时改进和并行化结合起来。这项工作伴随着附录，其中包含关于R和Python的特定软件包的信息，以及用于特定学习算法的信息和推荐的超参数搜索空间。我们还提供笔记本电脑，这些笔记本展示了这项工作的概念作为补充文件。

深度学习的巨大进步导致了跨越众多领域的前所未有的成就。虽然深度神经网络的性能是可培制的，但这种模型的架构设计和可解释性是非竞争的。已经引入了通过神经结构搜索（NAS）自动化神经网络架构的设计。最近的进展通过利用分布式计算和新颖的优化算法，这些方法更加务实。但是，在优化架构以获得可解释性的情况下几乎没有作用。为此，我们提出了一种多目标分布式NAS框架，可针对任务性能和内省进行优化。我们利用非主导的分类遗传算法（NSGA-II）并说明可以通过人类更好地理解的造成架构的AI（XAI）技术。框架在几个图像分类数据集上进行评估。我们展示了对内省能力和任务错误的联合优化，导致更具脱屑的体系结构，可在可容忍的错误中执行。

在神经结构的搜索算法设计（NAS）已经收到了很多关注，旨在提高性能和降低计算成本。尽管巨大的进步作出，很少有作者提出裁缝初始化技术NAS。然而，文献表明，一个好的初始一整套解决方案有助于找到最优解。因此，在这项研究中，我们提出了一个数据驱动的技术来初始化一个人口为基础的NAS算法。特别是，我们提出了一个两步法。首先，我们进行搜索空间的校准聚类分析，和第二，我们提取的重心，并利用它们来初始化NAS算法。我们的基准我们提出的针对使用三个人口为基础的算法，即遗传算法，进化算法，以及老化发展随机和拉丁方抽样方法初始化，上CIFAR-10。更具体地说，我们使用NAS-台-101利用NAS基准的可用性。结果表明，相比于随机和拉丁方抽样，所提出的初始化技术能够在各种搜索场景（不同的培训预算）达到显著的长期改善两个搜索基线，有时。此外，我们分析得到的溶液的分布，发现由数据驱动的初始化技术提供的人口使检索高健身和类似配置的局部最优（最大值）。

尽管人工神经网络（ANN）取得了重大进展，但其设计过程仍在臭名昭著，这主要取决于直觉，经验和反复试验。这个依赖人类的过程通常很耗时，容易出现错误。此外，这些模型通常与其训练环境绑定，而没有考虑其周围环境的变化。神经网络的持续适应性和自动化对于部署后模型可访问性的几个领域至关重要（例如，IoT设备，自动驾驶汽车等）。此外，即使是可访问的模型，也需要频繁的维护后部署后，以克服诸如概念/数据漂移之类的问题，这可能是繁琐且限制性的。当前关于自适应ANN的艺术状况仍然是研究的过早领域。然而，一种自动化和持续学习形式的神经体系结构搜索（NAS）最近在深度学习研究领域中获得了越来越多的动力，旨在提供更强大和适应性的ANN开发框架。这项研究是关于汽车和CL之间交集的首次广泛综述，概述了可以促进ANN中充分自动化和终身可塑性的不同方法的研究方向。

神经建筑搜索（NAS）已被广泛研究，并已成长为具有重大影响的研究领域。虽然经典的单目标NAS搜索具有最佳性能的体系结构，但多目标NAS考虑了应同时优化的多个目标，例如，将沿验证错误最小化资源使用率。尽管在多目标NAS领域已经取得了长足的进步，但我们认为实际关注的实际优化问题与多目标NAS试图解决的优化问题之间存在一些差异。我们通过将多目标NAS问题作为质量多样性优化（QDO）问题来解决这一差异，并引入了三种质量多样性NAS优化器（其中两个属于多重速度优化器组），以寻求高度多样化但多样化的体系结构对于特定于应用程序特定的利基，例如硬件约束。通过将这些优化器与它们的多目标对应物进行比较，我们证明了质量多样性总体上优于多目标NA在解决方案和效率方面。我们进一步展示了应用程序和未来的NAS研究如何在QDO上蓬勃发展。

超参数优化构成了典型的现代机器学习工作流程的很大一部分。这是由于这样一个事实，即机器学习方法和相应的预处理步骤通常只有在正确调整超参数时就会产生最佳性能。但是在许多应用中，我们不仅有兴趣仅仅为了预测精度而优化ML管道；确定最佳配置时，必须考虑其他指标或约束，从而导致多目标优化问题。由于缺乏知识和用于多目标超参数优化的知识和容易获得的软件实现，因此通常在实践中被忽略。在这项工作中，我们向读者介绍了多个客观超参数优化的基础知识，并激励其在应用ML中的实用性。此外，我们从进化算法和贝叶斯优化的领域提供了现有优化策略的广泛调查。我们说明了MOO在几个特定ML应用中的实用性，考虑了诸如操作条件，预测时间，稀疏，公平，可解释性和鲁棒性之类的目标。

We build new test sets for the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Both benchmarks have been the focus of intense research for almost a decade, raising the danger of overfitting to excessively re-used test sets. By closely following the original dataset creation processes, we test to what extent current classification models generalize to new data. We evaluate a broad range of models and find accuracy drops of 3% -15% on CIFAR-10 and 11% -14% on ImageNet. However, accuracy gains on the original test sets translate to larger gains on the new test sets. Our results suggest that the accuracy drops are not caused by adaptivity, but by the models' inability to generalize to slightly "harder" images than those found in the original test sets.