Single Cell Training on Architecture Search for Image Denoising

TL;DR

This paper introduces DPNAS, a reinforcement learning-based method for efficient neural architecture search at the block level for image denoising, incorporating dimension matching modules to handle feature map mismatches, achieving rapid search with reduced computation.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel block-level NAS approach with dimension matching modules, significantly reducing search space and computational cost for image denoising networks.

Findings

Completed architecture search in one day on a single GPU.

Achieved competitive denoising performance.

Introduced flexible dimension matching modules.

Abstract

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for automatically finding the optimal network architecture has shown some success with competitive performances in various computer vision tasks. However, NAS in general requires a tremendous amount of computations. Thus reducing computational cost has emerged as an important issue. Most of the attempts so far has been based on manual approaches, and often the architectures developed from such efforts dwell in the balance of the network optimality and the search cost. Additionally, recent NAS methods for image restoration generally do not consider dynamic operations that may transform dimensions of feature maps because of the dimensionality mismatch in tensor calculations. This can greatly limit NAS in its search for optimal network structure. To address these issues, we re-frame the optimal search problem by focusing at component block level. From previous work, it's been shown that an effective denoising block can be connected in series to further improve the network performance. By focusing at block level, the search space of reinforcement learning becomes significantly smaller and evaluation process can be conducted more rapidly. In addition, we integrate an innovative dimension matching modules for dealing with spatial and channel-wise mismatch that may occur in the optimal design search. This allows much flexibility in optimal network search within the cell block. With these modules, then we employ reinforcement learning in search of an optimal image denoising network at a module level. Computational efficiency of our proposed Denoising Prior Neural Architecture Search (DPNAS) was demonstrated by having it complete an optimal architecture search for an image restoration task by just one day with a single GPU.