No Arabic abstract
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) yields state-of-the-art neural networks that outperform their best manually-designed counterparts. However, previous NAS methods search for architectures under one set of training hyper-parameters (i.e., a training recipe), overlooking superior architecture-recipe combinations. To address this, we present Neural Architecture-Recipe Search (NARS) to search both (a) architectures and (b) their corresponding training recipes, simultaneously. NARS utilizes an accuracy predictor that scores architecture and training recipes jointly, guiding both sample selection and ranking. Furthermore, to compensate for the enlarged search space, we leverage free architecture statistics (e.g., FLOP count) to pretrain the predictor, significantly improving its sample efficiency and prediction reliability. After training the predictor via constrained iterative optimization, we run fast evolutionary searches in just CPU minutes to generate architecture-recipe pairs for a variety of resource constraints, called FBNetV3. FBNetV3 makes up a family of state-of-the-art compact neural networks that outperform both automatically and manually-designed competitors. For example, FBNetV3 matches both EfficientNet and ResNeSt accuracy on ImageNet with up to 2.0x and 7.1x fewer FLOPs, respectively. Furthermore, FBNetV3 yields significant performance gains for downstream object detection tasks, improving mAP despite 18% fewer FLOPs and 34% fewer parameters than EfficientNet-based equivalents.
The rise of machine learning technology inspires a boom of its applications in electronic design automation (EDA) and helps improve the degree of automation in chip designs. However, manually crafted machine learning models require extensive human expertise and tremendous engineering efforts. In this work, we leverage neural architecture search (NAS) to automatically develop high-quality neural architectures for routability prediction, which guides cell placement toward routable solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that the automatically generated neural architectures clearly outperform the manual solutions. Compared to the average case of manually designed models, NAS-generated models achieve $5.6%$ higher Kendalls $tau$ in predicting the number of nets with DRC violations and $1.95%$ larger area under ROC curve (ROC-AUC) in DRC hotspots detection.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS), aiming at automatically designing network architectures by machines, is hoped and expected to bring about a new revolution in machine learning. Despite these high expectation, the effectiveness and efficiency of existing NAS solutions are unclear, with some recent works going so far as to suggest that many existing NAS solutions are no better than random architecture selection. The inefficiency of NAS solutions may be attributed to inaccurate architecture evaluation. Specifically, to speed up NAS, recent works have proposed under-training different candidate architectures in a large search space concurrently by using shared network parameters; however, this has resulted in incorrect architecture ratings and furthered the ineffectiveness of NAS. In this work, we propose to modularize the large search space of NAS into blocks to ensure that the potential candidate architectures are fully trained; this reduces the representation shift caused by the shared parameters and leads to the correct rating of the candidates. Thanks to the block-wise search, we can also evaluate all of the candidate architectures within a block. Moreover, we find that the knowledge of a network model lies not only in the network parameters but also in the network architecture. Therefore, we propose to distill the neural architecture (DNA) knowledge from a teacher model as the supervision to guide our block-wise architecture search, which significantly improves the effectiveness of NAS. Remarkably, the capacity of our searched architecture has exceeded the teacher model, demonstrating the practicability and scalability of our method. Finally, our method achieves a state-of-the-art 78.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet in a mobile setting, which is about a 2.1% gain over EfficientNet-B0. All of our searched models along with the evaluation code are available online.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieves significant progress in many computer vision tasks. While many methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency of NAS, the search progress is still laborious because training and evaluating plausible architectures over large search space is time-consuming. Assessing network candidates under a proxy (i.e., computationally reduced setting) thus becomes inevitable. In this paper, we observe that most existing proxies exhibit different behaviors in maintaining the rank consistency among network candidates. In particular, some proxies can be more reliable -- the rank of candidates does not differ much comparing their reduced setting performance and final performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate some widely adopted reduction factors and report our observations. Inspired by these observations, we present a reliable proxy and further formulate a hierarchical proxy strategy. The strategy spends more computations on candidate networks that are potentially more accurate, while discards unpromising ones in early stage with a fast proxy. This leads to an economical evolutionary-based NAS (EcoNAS), which achieves an impressive 400x search time reduction in comparison to the evolutionary-based state of the art (8 vs. 3150 GPU days). Some new proxies led by our observations can also be applied to accelerate other NAS methods while still able to discover good candidate networks with performance matching those found by previous proxy strategies.
The goals of this research were to search for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, suitable for an on-device processor with limited computing resources, performing at substantially lower Network Architecture Search (NAS) costs. A new algorithm entitled an Early Exit Population Initialisation (EE-PI) for Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) was developed to achieve both goals. The EE-PI reduces the total number of parameters in the search process by filtering the models with fewer parameters than the maximum threshold. It will look for a new model to replace those models with parameters more than the threshold. Thereby, reducing the number of parameters, memory usage for model storage and processing time while maintaining the same performance or accuracy. The search time was reduced to 0.52 GPU day. This is a huge and significant achievement compared to the NAS of 4 GPU days achieved using NSGA-Net, 3,150 GPU days by the AmoebaNet model, and the 2,000 GPU days by the NASNet model. As well, Early Exit Evolutionary Algorithm networks (EEEA-Nets) yield network architectures with minimal error and computational cost suitable for a given dataset as a class of network algorithms. Using EEEA-Net on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, our experiments showed that EEEA-Net achieved the lowest error rate among state-of-the-art NAS models, with 2.46% for CIFAR-10, 15.02% for CIFAR-100, and 23.8% for ImageNet dataset. Further, we implemented this image recognition architecture for other tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and keypoint detection tasks, and, in our experiments, EEEA-Net-C2 outperformed MobileNet-V3 on all of these various tasks. (The algorithm code is available at https://github.com/chakkritte/EEEA-Net).
Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are widely speculated to deliver quantum advantages for practical problems under the quantum-classical hybrid computational paradigm in the near term. Both theoretical and practical developments of VQAs share many similarities with those of deep learning. For instance, a key component of VQAs is the design of task-dependent parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) as in the case of designing a good neural architecture in deep learning. Partly inspired by the recent success of AutoML and neural architecture search (NAS), quantum architecture search (QAS) is a collection of methods devised to engineer an optimal task-specific PQC. It has been proven that QAS-designed VQAs can outperform expert-crafted VQAs under various scenarios. In this work, we propose to use a neural network based predictor as the evaluation policy for QAS. We demonstrate a neural predictor guided QAS can discover powerful PQCs, yielding state-of-the-art results for various examples from quantum simulation and quantum machine learning. Notably, neural predictor guided QAS provides a better solution than that by the random-search baseline while using an order of magnitude less of circuit evaluations. Moreover, the predictor for QAS as well as the optimal ansatz found by QAS can both be transferred and generalized to address similar problems.