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.
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