Evolving Neural Architecture Using One Shot Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces EvNAS, a fast evolutionary neural architecture search method using a one shot model, which reduces search time and achieves competitive results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet.

Contribution

EvNAS applies a genetic algorithm with weight sharing and a novel decoding technique to significantly reduce NAS search time while improving performance.

Findings

Achieves 2.47% top-1 error on CIFAR-10

Reduces search time to 4.4 GPU days on a single GPU

Transfers architectures to CIFAR-100 and ImageNet with strong results

Abstract

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is emerging as a new research direction which has the potential to replace the hand-crafted neural architectures designed for specific tasks. Previous evolution based architecture search requires high computational resources resulting in high search time. In this work, we propose a novel way of applying a simple genetic algorithm to the NAS problem called EvNAS (Evolving Neural Architecture using One Shot Model) which reduces the search time significantly while still achieving better result than previous evolution based methods. The architectures are represented by using the architecture parameter of the one shot model which results in the weight sharing among the architectures for a given population of architectures and also weight inheritance from one generation to the next generation of architectures. We propose a decoding technique for the architecture parameter which is used to divert majority of the gradient information towards the given architecture and is also used for improving the performance prediction of the given architecture from the one shot model during the search process. Furthermore, we use the accuracy of the partially trained architecture on the validation data as a prediction of its fitness in order to reduce the search time. EvNAS searches for the architecture on the proxy dataset i.e. CIFAR-10 for 4.4 GPU day on a single GPU and achieves top-1 test error of 2.47% with 3.63M parameters which is then transferred to CIFAR-100 and ImageNet achieving top-1 error of 16.37% and top-5 error of 7.4% respectively. All of these results show the potential of evolutionary methods in solving the architecture search problem.