No Arabic abstract
Ensembles of CNN models trained with different seeds (also known as Deep Ensembles) are known to achieve superior performance over a single copy of the CNN. Neural Ensemble Search (NES) can further boost performance by adding architectural diversity. However, the scope of NES remains prohibitive under limited computational resources. In this work, we extend NES to multi-headed ensembles, which consist of a shared backbone attached to multiple prediction heads. Unlike Deep Ensembles, these multi-headed ensembles can be trained end to end, which enables us to leverage one-shot NAS methods to optimize an ensemble objective. With extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that multi-headed ensemble search finds robust ensembles 3 times faster, while having comparable performance to other ensemble search methods, in both predictive performance and uncertainty calibration.
Recently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been widely applied to automate the design of deep neural networks. Various NAS algorithms have been proposed to reduce the search cost and improve the generalization performance of those final selected architectures. However, these NAS algorithms aim to select only a single neural architecture from the search spaces and thus have overlooked the capability of other candidate architectures in helping improve the performance of their final selected architecture. To this end, we present two novel sampling algorithms under our Neural Ensemble Search via Sampling (NESS) framework that can effectively and efficiently select a well-performing ensemble of neural architectures from NAS search space. Compared with state-of-the-art NAS algorithms and other well-known ensemble search baselines, our NESS algorithms are shown to be able to achieve improved performance in both classification and adversarial defense tasks on various benchmark datasets while incurring a comparable search cost to these NAS algorithms.
Multi-objective Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to discover novel architectures in the presence of multiple conflicting objectives. Despite recent progress, the problem of approximating the full Pareto front accurately and efficiently remains challenging. In this work, we explore the novel reinforcement learning (RL) based paradigm of non-stationary policy gradient (NPG). NPG utilizes a non-stationary reward function, and encourages a continuous adaptation of the policy to capture the entire Pareto front efficiently. We introduce two novel reward functions with elements from the dominant paradigms of scalarization and evolution. To handle non-stationarity, we propose a new exploration scheme using cosine temperature decay with warm restarts. For fast and accurate architecture evaluation, we introduce a novel pre-trained shared model that we continuously fine-tune throughout training. Our extensive experimental study with various datasets shows that our framework can approximate the full Pareto front well at fast speeds. Moreover, our discovered cells can achieve supreme predictive performance compared to other multi-objective NAS methods, and other single-objective NAS methods at similar network sizes. Our work demonstrates the potential of NPG as a simple, efficient, and effective paradigm for multi-objective NAS.
Given multiple source datasets with labels, how can we train a target model with no labeled data? Multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) aims to train a model using multiple source datasets different from a target dataset in the absence of target data labels. MSDA is a crucial problem applicable to many practical cases where labels for the target data are unavailable due to privacy issues. Existing MSDA frameworks are limited since they align data without considering conditional distributions p(x|y) of each domain. They also miss a lot of target label information by not considering the target label at all and relying on only one feature extractor. In this paper, we propose Ensemble Multi-source Domain Adaptation with Pseudolabels (EnMDAP), a novel method for multi-source domain adaptation. EnMDAP exploits label-wise moment matching to align conditional distributions p(x|y), using pseudolabels for the unavailable target labels, and introduces ensemble learning theme by using multiple feature extractors for accurate domain adaptation. Extensive experiments show that EnMDAP provides the state-of-the-art performance for multi-source domain adaptation tasks in both of image domains and text domains.
Neural architecture search (NAS) is gaining more and more attention in recent years due to its flexibility and remarkable capability to reduce the burden of neural network design. To achieve better performance, however, the searching process usually costs massive computations that might not be affordable for researchers and practitioners. While recent attempts have employed ensemble learning methods to mitigate the enormous computational cost, however, they neglect a key property of ensemble methods, namely diversity, which leads to collecting more similar sub-architectures with potential redundancy in the final design. To tackle this problem, we propose a pruning method for NAS ensembles called Sub-Architecture Ensemble Pruning in Neural Architecture Search (SAEP). It targets to leverage diversity and to achieve sub-ensemble architectures at a smaller size with comparable performance to ensemble architectures that are not pruned. Three possible solutions are proposed to decide which sub-architectures to prune during the searching process. Experimental results exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed method by largely reducing the number of sub-architectures without degrading the performance.
Ensemble learning is a method of combining multiple trained models to improve model accuracy. We propose the usage of such methods, specifically ensemble average, inside Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures by replacing the single convolutional layers with Inner Average Ensembles (IEA) of multiple convolutional layers. Empirical results on different benchmarking datasets show that CNN models using IEA outperform those with regular convolutional layers. A visual and a similarity score analysis of the features generated from IEA explains why it boosts the model performance.