Data augmentation has been an indispensable tool to improve the performance of deep neural networks, however the augmentation can hardly transfer among different tasks and datasets. Consequently, a recent trend is to adopt AutoML technique to learn proper augmentation policy without extensive hand-crafted tuning. In this paper, we propose an efficient differentiable search algorithm called Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search (DDAS). It exploits meta-learning with one-step gradient update and continuous relaxation to the expected training loss for efficient search. Our DDAS can achieve efficient augmentation search without relying on approximations such as Gumbel Softmax or second order gradient approximation. To further reduce the adverse effect of improper augmentations, we organize the search space into a two level hierarchy, in which we first decide whether to apply augmentation, and then determine the specific augmentation policy. On standard image classification benchmarks, our DDAS achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency tradeoff while reducing the search cost dramatically, e.g. 0.15 GPU hours for CIFAR-10. In addition, we also use DDAS to search augmentation for object detection task and achieve comparable performance with AutoAugment, while being 1000x faster.
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Huawei International Pte Ltd（华为国际私人有限公司）
Existing 3D human pose estimators suffer poor generalization performance to new datasets, largely due to the limited diversity of 2D-3D pose pairs in the training data. To address this problem, we present PoseAug, a new auto-augmentation framework that learns to augment the available training poses towards a greater diversity and thus improve generalization of the trained 2D-to-3D pose estimator. Specifically, PoseAug introduces a novel pose augmentor that learns to adjust various geometry factors (e.g., posture, body size, view point and position) of a pose through differentiable operations. …
JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
It is challenging to train a robust object detector under the supervised learning setting when the annotated data are scarce. Thus, previous approaches tackling this problem are in two categories: semi-supervised learning models that interpolate labeled data from unlabeled data, and self-supervised learning approaches that exploit signals within unlabeled data via pretext tasks. To seamlessly integrate and enhance existing supervised object detection methods, in this work, we focus on addressing the data scarcity problem from a fundamental viewpoint without changing the supervised learning par…
National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology（国防科技创新研究院）
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalization in training deep neural networks. Recent works show that using worst-case transformations or adversarial augmentation strategies can significantly improve the accuracy and robustness. However, due to the non-differentiable properties of image transformations, searching algorithms such as reinforcement learning or evolution strategy have to be applied, which are not computationally practical for large scale problems. In this work, we show that by simply applying consistency training with random data augmentation, state-of-the-art …
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Even as deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success on vision-related tasks, their performance is brittle to transformations in the input. Of particular interest are semantic transformations that model changes that have a basis in the physical world, such as rotations, translations, changes in lighting or camera pose. In this paper, we show how differentiable rendering can be utilized to generate images that are informative, yet realistic, and which can be used to analyze DNN performance and improve its robustness through data augmentation. Given a differentiable renderer and …
Peking University（北京大学）；Canon Medical Systems（佳能医疗系统公司）
Data augmentation is an effective and universal technique for improving generalization performance of deep neural networks. It could enrich diversity of training samples that is essential in medical image segmentation tasks because 1) the scale of medical image dataset is typically smaller, which may increase the risk of overfitting; 2) the shape and modality of different objects such as organs or tumors are unique, thus requiring customized data augmentation policy. However, most data augmentation implementations are hand-crafted and suboptimal in medical image processing. To fully exploit th…
Despite the recent developments in vision-related problems using deep neural networks, there still remains a wide scope in the improvement of generalizing these models to unseen examples. In this paper, we explore the domain of few-shot learning with a novel augmentation technique. In contrast to other generative augmentation techniques, where the distribution over input images are learnt, we propose to learn the probability distribution over the image transformation parameters which are easier and quicker to learn. Our technique is fully differentiable which enables its extension to versatile…
Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) has been applied to automatically search high-performance networks for medical image segmentation. The NAS search space usually contains a network topology level (controlling connections among cells with different spatial scales) and a cell level (operations within each cell). Existing methods either require long searching time for large-scale 3D image datasets, or are limited to pre-defined topologies (such as U-shaped or single-path). In this work, we focus on three important aspects of NAS in 3D medical image segmentation: flexible multi-path netwo…
Data augmentations are important in training high-performance 3D object detectors for point clouds. Despite recent efforts on designing new data augmentations, perhaps surprisingly, most state-of-the-art 3D detectors only use a few simple data augmentations. In particular, different from 2D image data augmentations, 3D data augmentations need to account for different representations of input data and require being customized for different models, which introduces significant overhead. In this paper, we resort to a search-based approach, and propose LidarAugment, a practical and effective data …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；SmartMore
We propose Scale-aware AutoAug to learn data augmentation policies for object detection. We define a new scale-aware search space, where both image- and box-level augmentations are designed for maintaining scale invariance. Upon this search space, we propose a new search metric, termed Pareto Scale Balance, to facilitate search with high efficiency. In experiments, Scale-aware AutoAug yields significant and consistent improvement on various object detectors (e.g., RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and FCOS), even compared with strong multi-scale training baselines. Our searched augmentation…
Neural architecture search (NAS) has been an active direction of automatic machine learning (Auto-ML), aiming to explore efficient network structures. The searched architecture is evaluated by training on datasets with fixed data augmentation policies. However, recent works on auto-augmentation show that the suited augmentation policies can vary over different structures. Therefore, this work considers the possible coupling between neural architectures and data augmentation and proposes an effective algorithm jointly searching for them. Specifically, 1) for the NAS task, we adopt a single-path…
Apple（苹果公司）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
State-of-the-art automatic augmentation methods (e.g., AutoAugment and RandAugment) for visual recognition tasks diversify training data using a large set of augmentation operations. The range of magnitudes of many augmentation operations (e.g., brightness and contrast) is continuous. Therefore, to make search computationally tractable, these methods use fixed and manually-defined magnitude ranges for each operation, which may lead to sub-optimal policies. To answer the open question on the importance of magnitude ranges for each augmentation operation, we introduce RangeAugment that allows us…
Recent work has shown that data augmentation has the potential to significantly improve the generalization of deep learning models. Recently, automated augmentation strategies have led to state-of-the-art results in image classification and object detection. While these strategies were optimized for improving validation accuracy, they also led to state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised learning and improved robustness to common corruptions of images. An obstacle to a large-scale adoption of these methods is a separate search phase which increases the training complexity and may substantial…
Optimization of image transformation functions for the purpose of data augmentation has been intensively studied. In particular, adversarial data augmentation strategies, which search augmentation maximizing task loss, show significant improvement in the model generalization for many tasks. However, the existing methods require careful parameter tuning to avoid excessively strong deformations that take away image features critical for acquiring generalization. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation optimization method based on the adversarial strategy called TeachAugment, which can prod…
A common challenge posed to robust semantic segmentation is the expensive data annotation cost. Existing semi-supervised solutions show great potential for solving this problem. Their key idea is constructing consistency regularization with unsupervised data augmentation from unlabeled data for model training. The perturbations for unlabeled data enable the consistency training loss, which benefits semi-supervised semantic segmentation. However, these perturbations destroy image context and introduce unnatural boundaries, which is harmful for semantic segmentation. Besides, the widely adopted …
In many machine learning problems, large-scale datasets have become the de-facto standard to train state-of-the-art deep networks at the price of heavy computation load. In this paper, we focus on condensing large training sets into significantly smaller synthetic sets which can be used to train deep neural networks from scratch with minimum drop in performance. Inspired from the recent training set synthesis methods, we propose Differentiable Siamese Augmentation that enables effective use of data augmentation to synthesize more informative synthetic images and thus achieves better performanc…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Anyvision（Anyvision公司）；Queens University of Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）；School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）
Data augmentation (DA) techniques aim to increase data variability, and thus train deep networks with better generalisation. The pioneering AutoAugment automated the search for optimal DA policies with reinforcement learning. However, AutoAugment is extremely computationally expensive, limiting its wide applicability. Followup works such as Population Based Augmentation (PBA) and Fast AutoAugment improved efficiency, but their optimization speed remains a bottleneck. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Automatic Data Augmentation (DADA) which dramatically reduces the cost. DADA relaxes th…
Enhance Then Search: An Augmentation-Search Strategy with Foundation Models for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial（工业机器人与信息学研究所）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg（弗里德里希-亚历山大大学埃尔兰根-纽伦堡分校）
In this paper we present a review of the Kornia differentiable data augmentation (DDA) module for both for spatial (2D) and volumetric (3D) tensors. This module leverages differentiable computer vision solutions from Kornia, with an aim of integrating data augmentation (DA) pipelines and strategies to existing PyTorch components (e.g. autograd for differentiability, optim for optimization). In addition, we provide a benchmark comparing different DA frameworks and a short review for a number of approaches that make use of Kornia DDA.
The performance of generative adversarial networks (GANs) heavily deteriorates given a limited amount of training data. This is mainly because the discriminator is memorizing the exact training set. To combat it, we propose Differentiable Augmentation (DiffAugment), a simple method that improves the data efficiency of GANs by imposing various types of differentiable augmentations on both real and fake samples. Previous attempts to directly augment the training data manipulate the distribution of real images, yielding little benefit; DiffAugment enables us to adopt the differentiable augmentati…
Logo retrieval is a challenging problem since the definition of similarity is more subjective compared to image retrieval tasks and the set of known similarities is very scarce. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a simple but effective segment-based augmentation strategy to introduce artificially similar logos for training deep networks for logo retrieval. In this novel augmentation strategy, we first find segments in a logo and apply transformations such as rotation, scaling, and color change, on the segments, unlike the conventional image-level augmentation strategies. Moreo…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Preferred Networks inc.（Preferred Networks公司）
The common pipeline of training deep neural networks consists of several building blocks such as data augmentation and network architecture selection. AutoML is a research field that aims at automatically designing those parts, but most methods explore each part independently because it is more challenging to simultaneously search all the parts. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization method for data augmentation policies and network architectures to bring more automation to the design of training pipeline. The core idea of our approach is to make the whole part differentiable. The prop…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Previous attempts for data augmentation are designed manually, and the augmentation policies are dataset-specific. Recently, an automatic data augmentation approach, named AutoAugment, is proposed using reinforcement learning. AutoAugment searches for the augmentation polices in the discrete search space, which may lead to a sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we employ the Augmented Random Search method (ARS) to improve the performance of AutoAugment. Our key contribution is to change the discrete search space to continuous space, which will improve the searching performance and maintain the…
Recently, differentiable search methods have made major progress in reducing the computational costs of neural architecture search. However, these approaches often report lower accuracy in evaluating the searched architecture or transferring it to another dataset. This is arguably due to the large gap between the architecture depths in search and evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm which allows the depth of searched architectures to grow gradually during the training procedure. This brings two issues, namely, heavier computational overheads and weaker search …
Network architecture search (NAS) achieves state-of-the-art results in various tasks such as classification and semantic segmentation. Recently, a reinforcement learning-based approach has been proposed for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) search. In this work, we propose an alternative strategy for GAN search by using a method called DEGAS (Differentiable Efficient GenerAtor Search), which focuses on efficiently finding the generator in the GAN. Our search algorithm is inspired by the differential architecture search strategy and the Global Latent Optimization (GLO) procedure. This lead…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Data augmentation methods are indispensable heuristics to boost the performance of deep neural networks, especially in image recognition tasks. Recently, several studies have shown that augmentation strategies found by search algorithms outperform hand-made strategies. Such methods employ black-box search algorithms over image transformations with continuous or discrete parameters and require a long time to obtain better strategies. In this paper, we propose a differentiable policy search pipeline for data augmentation, which is much faster than previous methods. We introduce approximate gradi…
DASViT: Differentiable Architecture Search for Vision Transformer
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering University of Surrey（计算机科学与电子工程学院大学 Surrey 大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Jiangnan University（人工智能与计算机科学学院江南大学）
Data augmentation is an effective technique to improve the generalization of deep neural networks. Recently, AutoAugment proposed a well-designed search space and a search algorithm that automatically finds augmentation policies in a data-driven manner. However, AutoAugment is computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient gradient-based search algorithm, called Hypernetwork-Based Augmentation (HBA), which simultaneously learns model parameters and augmentation hyperparameters in a single training. Our HBA uses a hypernetwork to approximate a population-based training algori…
Differentiable ARchiTecture Search (DARTS) is one of the most trending Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods. It drastically reduces search cost by resorting to weight-sharing. However, it also dramatically reduces the search space, thus excluding potential promising architectures. In this article, we propose D-DARTS, a solution that addresses this problem by nesting neural networks at the cell level instead of using weight-sharing to produce more diversified and specialized architectures. Moreover, we introduce a novel algorithm that can derive deeper architectures from a few trained cells…
In this paper we propose a novel network adaption method called Differentiable Network Adaption (DNA), which can adapt an existing network to a specific computation budget by adjusting the width and depth in a differentiable manner. The gradient-based optimization allows DNA to achieve an automatic optimization of width and depth rather than previous heuristic methods that heavily rely on human priors. Moreover, we propose a new elastic search space that can flexibly condense or expand during the optimization process, allowing the network optimization of width and depth in a bi-direction manne…
Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Augmenting training datasets has been shown to improve the learning effectiveness for several computer vision tasks. A good augmentation produces an augmented dataset that adds variability while retaining the statistical properties of the original dataset. Some techniques, such as AutoAugment and Fast AutoAugment, have introduced a search phase to find a set of suitable augmentation policies for a given model and dataset. This comes at the cost of great computational overhead, adding up to several thousand GPU hours. More recently RandAugment was proposed to substantially speedup the search ph…
Neural architecture search (NAS) aims to discover network architectures with desired properties such as high accuracy or low latency. Recently, differentiable NAS (DNAS) has demonstrated promising results while maintaining a search cost orders of magnitude lower than reinforcement learning (RL) based NAS. However, DNAS models can only optimize differentiable loss functions in search, and they require an accurate differentiable approximation of non-differentiable criteria. In this work, we present UNAS, a unified framework for NAS, that encapsulates recent DNAS and RL-based approaches under one…
In differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms like DARTS, the training set used to update model weight and the validation set used to update model architectures are sampled from the same data distribution. Thus, the uncommon features in the dataset fail to receive enough attention during training. In this paper, instead of introducing more complex NAS algorithms, we explore the idea that adding quality synthesized datasets into training can help the classification model identify its weakness and improve recognition accuracy. We introduce a training strategy called ``Differentia…
Recently, there has been a growing interest in automating the process of neural architecture design, and the Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) method makes the process available within a few GPU days. However, the performance of DARTS is often observed to collapse when the number of search epochs becomes large. Meanwhile, lots of "{\em skip-connect}s" are found in the selected architectures. In this paper, we claim that the cause of the collapse is that there exists overfitting in the optimization of DARTS. Therefore, we propose a simple and effective algorithm, named "DARTS+", to avo…
There has been a large literature of neural architecture search, but most existing work made use of heuristic rules that largely constrained the search flexibility. In this paper, we first relax these manually designed constraints and enlarge the search space to contain more than $10^{160}$ candidates. In the new space, most existing differentiable search methods can fail dramatically. We then propose a novel algorithm named Gradual One-Level Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (GOLD-NAS) which introduces a variable resource constraint to one-level optimization so that the weak operators…
Differentiable architecture search (DAS) is a widely researched tool for the discovery of novel architectures, due to its promising results for image classification. The main benefit of DAS is the effectiveness achieved through the weight-sharing one-shot paradigm, which allows efficient architecture search. In this work, we investigate DAS in a systematic case study of inverse problems, which allows us to analyze these potential benefits in a controlled manner. We demonstrate that the success of DAS can be extended from image classification to signal reconstruction, in principle. However, our…
The convolutional neural network has achieved great success in fulfilling computer vision tasks despite large computation overhead against efficient deployment. Structured (channel) pruning is usually applied to reduce the model redundancy while preserving the network structure, such that the pruned network can be easily deployed in practice. However, existing structured pruning methods require hand-crafted rules which may lead to tremendous pruning space. In this paper, we introduce Differentiable Annealing Indicator Search (DAIS) that leverages the strength of neural architecture search in t…
Low-precision networks, with weights and activations quantized to low bit-width, are widely used to accelerate inference on edge devices. However, current solutions are uniform, using identical bit-width for all filters. This fails to account for the different sensitivities of different filters and is suboptimal. Mixed-precision networks address this problem, by tuning the bit-width to individual filter requirements. In this work, the problem of optimal mixed-precision network search (MPS) is considered. To circumvent its difficulties of discrete search space and combinatorial optimization, a …
This paper addresses the scalability challenge of architecture search by formulating the task in a differentiable manner. Unlike conventional approaches of applying evolution or reinforcement learning over a discrete and non-differentiable search space, our method is based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture representation, allowing efficient search of the architecture using gradient descent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 show that our algorithm excels in discovering high-performance convolutional architectures for image classification a…
Deep learning models with large learning capacities often overfit to medical imaging datasets. This is because training sets are often relatively small due to the significant time and financial costs incurred in medical data acquisition and labelling. Data augmentation is therefore often used to expand the availability of training data and to increase generalization. However, augmentation strategies are often chosen on an ad-hoc basis without justification. In this paper, we present an augmentation policy search method with the goal of improving model classification performance. We include in …
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Intel Labs China（英特尔中国研究院）
For network architecture search (NAS), it is crucial but challenging to simultaneously guarantee both effectiveness and efficiency. Towards achieving this goal, we develop a differentiable NAS solution, where the search space includes arbitrary feed-forward network consisting of the predefined number of connections. Benefiting from a proposed ensemble Gumbel-Softmax estimator, our method optimizes both the architecture of a deep network and its parameters in the same round of backward propagation, yielding an end-to-end mechanism of searching network architectures. Extensive experiments on a v…
Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown encouraging results in automating the architecture design. Recently, DARTS relaxes the search process with a differentiable formulation that leverages weight-sharing and SGD where all candidate operations are trained simultaneously. Our empirical results show that such procedure results in the co-adaption problem and Matthew Effect: operations with fewer parameters would be trained maturely earlier. This causes two problems: firstly, the operations with more parameters may never have the chance to express the desired function since those with less hav…
Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) is a prevailing NAS solution to identify architectures. Based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture space, DARTS learns a differentiable architecture weight and largely reduces the search cost. However, its stability has been challenged for yielding deteriorating architectures as the search proceeds. We find that the precipitous validation loss landscape, which leads to a dramatic performance drop when distilling the final architecture, is an essential factor that causes instability. Based on this observation, we propose a perturbation-base…
In deep learning applications, the architectures of deep neural networks are crucial in achieving high accuracy. Many methods have been proposed to search for high-performance neural architectures automatically. However, these searched architectures are prone to adversarial attacks. A small perturbation of the input data can render the architecture to change prediction outcomes significantly. To address this problem, we propose methods to perform differentiable search of robust neural architectures. In our methods, two differentiable metrics are defined to measure architectures' robustness, ba…
Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted extensive attention due to its efficiency in searching for cell structures. DARTS mainly focuses on the operation search and derives the cell topology from the operation weights. However, the operation weights can not indicate the importance of cell topology and result in poor topology rating correctness. To tackle this, we propose to Decouple the Operation and Topology Search (DOTS), which decouples the topology representation from operation weights and makes an explicit topology search. DOTS is achieved by introducing a topology search…
Samsung AI Center Moscow（三星莫斯科人工智能中心）；Samsung-HSE Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院三星-高等经济学院实验室）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
Test-time data augmentation$-$averaging the predictions of a machine learning model across multiple augmented samples of data$-$is a widely used technique that improves the predictive performance. While many advanced learnable data augmentation techniques have emerged in recent years, they are focused on the training phase. Such techniques are not necessarily optimal for test-time augmentation and can be outperformed by a policy consisting of simple crops and flips. The primary goal of this paper is to demonstrate that test-time augmentation policies can be successfully learned too. We introdu…
Differentiable architecture search (DAS) has made great progress in searching for high-performance architectures with reduced computational cost. However, DAS-based methods mainly focus on searching for a repeatable cell structure, which is then stacked sequentially in multiple stages to form the networks. This configuration significantly reduces the search space, and ignores the importance of connections between the cells. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Differentiable Architecture Search (H-DAS) that performs architecture search both at the cell level an…
Differentiable neural architecture search methods became popular in recent years, mainly due to their low search costs and flexibility in designing the search space. However, these methods suffer the difficulty in optimizing network, so that the searched network is often unfriendly to hardware. This paper deals with this problem by adding a differentiable latency loss term into optimization, so that the search process can tradeoff between accuracy and latency with a balancing coefficient. The core of latency prediction is to encode each network architecture and feed it into a multi-layer regre…
Differentiable architecture search is prevalent in the field of NAS because of its simplicity and efficiency, where two paradigms, multi-path algorithms and single-path methods, are dominated. Multi-path framework (e.g. DARTS) is intuitive but suffers from memory usage and training collapse. Single-path methods (e.g.GDAS and ProxylessNAS) mitigate the memory issue and shrink the gap between searching and evaluation but sacrifice the performance. In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple yet efficient method to bridge these two paradigms, referred as Mutually-aware Sub-Graphs Differentiab…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Yazd University（亚兹德大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）
A strong visual object tracker nowadays relies on its well-crafted modules, which typically consist of manually-designed network architectures to deliver high-quality tracking results. Not surprisingly, the manual design process becomes a particularly challenging barrier, as it demands sufficient prior experience, enormous effort, intuition, and perhaps some good luck. Meanwhile, neural architecture search has gaining grounds in practical applications as a promising method in tackling the issue of automated search of feasible network structures. In this work, we propose a novel cell-level diff…
Tencent（腾讯）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) tasks have achieved significant performance with deep neural networks. However, the large number of parameters in CNN-based met-hods for SISR tasks require heavy computations. Although several efficient SISR models have been recently proposed, most are handcrafted and thus lack flexibility. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach on both the cell-level and network-level to search for lightweight SISR models. Specifically, the cell-level search space is designed based on an information distillation mechanism,…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Tencent Data Platform（腾讯数据平台部）；Microsoft（微软）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are formulated as minimax game problems, whereby generators attempt to approach real data distributions by virtue of adversarial learning against discriminators. The intrinsic problem complexity poses the challenge to enhance the performance of generative networks. In this work, we aim to boost model learning from the perspective of network architectures, by incorporating recent progress on automated architecture search into GANs. To this end, we propose a fully differentiable search framework for generative adversarial networks, dubbed alphaGAN. The sear…
Most differentiable neural architecture search methods construct a super-net for search and derive a target-net as its sub-graph for evaluation. There exists a significant gap between the architectures in search and evaluation. As a result, current methods suffer from an inconsistent, inefficient, and inflexible search process. In this paper, we introduce EnTranNAS that is composed of Engine-cells and Transit-cells. The Engine-cell is differentiable for architecture search, while the Transit-cell only transits a sub-graph by architecture derivation. Consequently, the gap between the architectu…
CRIPAC & NLPR, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所 模式识别国家重点实验室与智能感知与计算研究中心）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
With the flourish of differentiable neural architecture search (NAS), automatically searching latency-constrained architectures gives a new perspective to reduce human labor and expertise. However, the searched architectures are usually suboptimal in accuracy and may have large jitters around the target latency. In this paper, we rethink three freedoms of differentiable NAS, i.e. operation-level, depth-level and width-level, and propose a novel method, named Three-Freedom NAS (TF-NAS), to achieve both good classification accuracy and precise latency constraint. For the operation-level, we pres…
