Finding optimal channel dimensions (i.e., the number of filters in DNN layers) is essential to design DNNs that perform well under computational resource constraints. Recent work in neural architecture search aims at automating the optimization of the DNN model implementation. However, existing neural architecture search methods for channel dimensions rely on fixed search spaces, which prevents achieving an efficient and fully automated solution. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable neural architecture search method with an efficient dynamic channel allocation algorithm to enable a flexible search space for channel dimensions. We show that the proposed framework is able to find DNN architectures that are equivalent to previous methods in task accuracy and inference latency for the CIFAR-10 dataset with an improvement of $1.3-1.7\times$ in GPU-hours and $1.5-1.7\times$ in the memory requirements during the architecture search stage. Moreover, the proposed frameworks do not require a well-engineered search space a priori, which is an important step towards fully automated design of DNN architectures.
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Samsung AI Center Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
We formalize and analyze a fundamental component of differentiable neural architecture search (NAS): local "operation scoring" at each operation choice. We view existing operation scoring functions as inexact proxies for accuracy, and we find that they perform poorly when analyzed empirically on NAS benchmarks. From this perspective, we introduce a novel \textit{perturbation-based zero-cost operation scoring} (Zero-Cost-PT) approach, which utilizes zero-cost proxies that were recently studied in multi-trial NAS but degrade significantly on larger search spaces, typical for differentiable NAS. …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；SRI International（斯坦福国际研究院）
As progress is made on training machine learning models on incrementally expanding classification tasks (i.e., incremental learning), a next step is to translate this progress to industry expectations. One technique missing from incremental learning is automatic architecture design via Neural Architecture Search (NAS). In this paper, we show that leveraging NAS for incremental learning results in strong performance gains for classification tasks. Specifically, we contribute the following: first, we create a strong baseline approach for incremental learning based on Differentiable Architecture …
Benefiting from the search efficiency, differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) has evolved as the most dominant alternative to automatically design competitive deep neural networks (DNNs). We note that DNNs must be executed under strictly hard performance constraints in real-world scenarios, for example, the runtime latency on autonomous vehicles. However, to obtain the architecture that meets the given performance constraint, previous hardware-aware differentiable NAS methods have to repeat a plethora of search runs to manually tune the hyper-parameters by trial and error, and thus th…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；BAIDU USA LLC（百度美国有限责任公司）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Neural Architecture Search~(NAS) has attracted increasingly more attention in recent years because of its capability to design deep neural networks automatically. Among them, differential NAS approaches such as DARTS, have gained popularity for the search efficiency. However, they suffer from two main issues, the weak robustness to the performance collapse and the poor generalization ability of the searched architectures. To solve these two problems, a simple-but-efficient regularization method, termed as Beta-Decay, is proposed to regularize the DARTS-based NAS searching process. Specifically…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Hallym University（翰林大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
As deep neural networks achieve unprecedented performance in various tasks, neural architecture search (NAS), a research field for designing neural network architectures with automated processes, is actively underway. More recently, differentiable NAS has a great impact by reducing the search cost to the level of training a single network. Besides, the search space that defines candidate architectures to be searched directly affects the performance of the final architecture. In this paper, we propose an adaptation scheme of the search space by introducing a search scope. The effectiveness of p…
FX-DARTS: Designing Topology-unconstrained Architectures with Differentiable Architecture Search and Entropy-based Super-network Shrinking
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学香槟分校）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；Universita’ Della Svizzera Italiana（瑞士意大利大学）
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Oracle（甲骨文公司）
Neural Architecture Search has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Among them, differential NAS approaches such as DARTS, have gained popularity for the search efficiency. However, they still suffer from three main issues, that are, the weak stability due to the performance collapse, the poor generalization ability of the searched architectures, and the inferior robustness to different kinds of proxies. To solve the stability and generalization problems, a simple-but-effective regularization method, termed as Beta-Decay, is proposed to regularize the DARTS-based NAS searching proce…
Neural architecture search (NAS) is a recent methodology for automating the design of neural network architectures. Differentiable neural architecture search (DARTS) is a promising NAS approach that dramatically increases search efficiency. However, it has been shown to suffer from performance collapse, where the search often leads to detrimental architectures. Many recent works try to address this issue of DARTS by identifying indicators for early stopping, regularising the search objective to reduce the dominance of some operations, or changing the parameterisation of the search problem. In …
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…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）
Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DARTS) is becoming more and more popular among Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods because of its high search efficiency and low compute cost. However, the stability of DARTS is very inferior, especially skip connections aggregation that leads to performance collapse. Though existing methods leverage Hessian eigenvalues to alleviate skip connections aggregation, they make DARTS unable to explore architectures with better performance. In the paper, we propose operation-level progressive differentiable neural architecture search (OPP-DARTS) to avoi…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Controversy exists on whether differentiable neural architecture search methods discover wiring topology effectively. To understand how wiring topology evolves, we study the underlying mechanism of several existing differentiable NAS frameworks. Our investigation is motivated by three observed searching patterns of differentiable NAS: 1) they search by growing instead of pruning; 2) wider networks are more preferred than deeper ones; 3) no edges are selected in bi-level optimization. To anatomize these phenomena, we propose a unified view on searching algorithms of existing frameworks, transfe…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been a source of dramatic improvements in neural network design, with recent results meeting or exceeding the performance of hand-tuned architectures. However, our understanding of how to represent the search space for neural net architectures and how to search that space efficiently are both still in their infancy. We have performed an in-depth analysis to identify limitations in a widely used search space and a recent architecture search method, Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS). These findings led us to introduce novel network blocks with a more…
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 …
This paper reports the first successful application of a differentiable architecture search (DARTS) approach to the deepfake and spoofing detection problems. An example of neural architecture search, DARTS operates upon a continuous, differentiable search space which enables both the architecture and parameters to be optimised via gradient descent. Solutions based on partially-connected DARTS use random channel masking in the search space to reduce GPU time and automatically learn and optimise complex neural architectures composed of convolutional operations and residual blocks. Despite being …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Advanced Digital Sciences Center（先进数字科学中心）；IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
High quality AI solutions require joint optimization of AI algorithms and their hardware implementations. In this work, we are the first to propose a fully simultaneous, efficient differentiable DNN architecture and implementation co-search (EDD) methodology. We formulate the co-search problem by fusing DNN search variables and hardware implementation variables into one solution space, and maximize both algorithm accuracy and hardware implementation quality. The formulation is differentiable with respect to the fused variables, so that gradient descent algorithm can be applied to greatly reduc…
Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has received massive attention in recent years, mainly because it significantly reduces the computational cost through weight sharing and continuous relaxation. However, more recent works find that existing differentiable NAS techniques struggle to outperform naive baselines, yielding deteriorative architectures as the search proceeds. Rather than directly optimizing the architecture parameters, this paper formulates the neural architecture search as a distribution learning problem through relaxing the architecture weights into Gaussian distributions.…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田工业大学）
In hardware-aware Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DNAS), it is challenging to compute gradients of hardware metrics to perform architecture search. Existing works rely on linear approximations with limited support to customized hardware accelerators. In this work, we propose End-to-end Hardware-aware DNAS (EH-DNAS), a seamless integration of end-to-end hardware benchmarking, and fully automated DNAS to deliver hardware-efficient deep neural networks on various platforms, including Edge GPUs, Edge TPUs, Mobile CPUs, and customized accelerators. Given a desired hardware platform, we p…
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 with multi-dimensional attention for spiking neural networks
Nanjing Institute of Intelligent Technology（南京智能技术研究院）；School of Integrated Circuits, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学集成电路学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院微电子研究所）
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）
\textit{Differentiable ARchiTecture Search} (DARTS) has recently become the mainstream of neural architecture search (NAS) due to its efficiency and simplicity. With a gradient-based bi-level optimization, DARTS alternately optimizes the inner model weights and the outer architecture parameter in a weight-sharing supernet. A key challenge to the scalability and quality of the learned architectures is the need for differentiating through the inner-loop optimisation. While much has been discussed about several potentially fatal factors in DARTS, the architecture gradient, a.k.a. hypergradient, h…
Realistic use of neural networks often requires adhering to multiple constraints on latency, energy and memory among others. A popular approach to find fitting networks is through constrained Neural Architecture Search (NAS), however, previous methods enforce the constraint only softly. Therefore, the resulting networks do not exactly adhere to the resource constraint and their accuracy is harmed. In this work we resolve this by introducing Hard Constrained diffeRentiable NAS (HardCoRe-NAS), that is based on an accurate formulation of the expected resource requirement and a scalable search met…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）
Differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) is known for its capacity in the automatic generation of superior neural networks. However, DNAS based methods suffer from memory usage explosion when the search space expands, which may prevent them from running successfully on even advanced GPU platforms. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) based methods, while being memory efficient, are extremely time-consuming. Combining the advantages of both types of methods, this paper presents RADARS, a scalable RL-aided DNAS framework that can explore large search spaces in a fast and memory…
Xiaomi AI Lab（小米人工智能实验室）；Minzu University of China（中央民族大学）
Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) is now a widely disseminated weight-sharing neural architecture search method. However, it suffers from well-known performance collapse due to an inevitable aggregation of skip connections. In this paper, we first disclose that its root cause lies in an unfair advantage in exclusive competition. Through experiments, we show that if either of two conditions is broken, the collapse disappears. Thereby, we present a novel approach called Fair DARTS where the exclusive competition is relaxed to be collaborative. Specifically, we let each operation's archi…
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…
Improving Differentiable Architecture Search via Self-Distillation
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
Differentiable neural architecture search (DARTS), as a gradient-guided search method, greatly reduces the cost of computation and speeds up the search. In DARTS, the architecture parameters are introduced to the candidate operations, but the parameters of some weight-equipped operations may not be trained well in the initial stage, which causes unfair competition between candidate operations. The weight-free operations appear in large numbers which results in the phenomenon of performance crash. Besides, a lot of memory will be occupied during training supernet which causes the memory utiliza…
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）
Optimizing resource utilization in target platforms is key to achieving high performance during DNN inference. While optimizations have been proposed for inference latency, memory footprint, and energy consumption, prior hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) methods have omitted resource utilization, preventing DNNs to take full advantage of the target inference platforms. Modeling resource utilization efficiently and accurately is challenging, especially for widely-used array-based inference accelerators such as Google TPU. In this work, we propose a novel hardware-aware NAS framewo…
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…
Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University（北京大学前沿交叉学科研究院）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学数学科学学院）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) is successfully applied in many vision tasks. However, directly using DARTS for Transformers is memory-intensive, which renders the search process infeasible. To this end, we propose a multi-split reversible network and combine it with DARTS. Specifically, we devise a backpropagation-with-reconstruction algorithm so that we only need to store the last layer's outputs. By relieving the memory burden for DARTS, it allows us to search with larger hidden size and more candidate operations. We evaluate the searched architecture on three sequence-to-sequenc…
Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (DNAS) has demonstrated great success in designing state-of-the-art, efficient neural networks. However, DARTS-based DNAS's search space is small when compared to other search methods', since all candidate network layers must be explicitly instantiated in memory. To address this bottleneck, we propose a memory and computationally efficient DNAS variant: DMaskingNAS. This algorithm expands the search space by up to $10^{14}\times$ over conventional DNAS, supporting searches over spatial and channel dimensions that are otherwise prohibitively expensive: …
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…
Sandia National Laboratories（桑迪亚国家实验室）；University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Early neural network architectures were designed by so-called "grad student descent". Since then, the field of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has developed with the goal of algorithmically designing architectures tailored for a dataset of interest. Recently, gradient-based NAS approaches have been created to rapidly perform the search. Gradient-based approaches impose more structure on the search, compared to alternative NAS methods, enabling faster search phase optimization. In the real-world, neural architecture performance is measured by more than just high accuracy. There is increasing n…
One-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to minimize the computational expense of discovering state-of-the-art models. However, in the past year attention has been drawn to the comparable performance of naive random search across the same search spaces used by leading NAS algorithms. To address this, we explore the effects of drastically relaxing the NAS search space, and we present Bonsai-Net, an efficient one-shot NAS method to explore our relaxed search space. Bonsai-Net is built around a modified differential pruner and can consistently discover state-of-the-art architectures that ar…
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…
Co-exploration of an optimal neural architecture and its hardware accelerator is an approach of rising interest which addresses the computational cost problem, especially in low-profile systems. The large co-exploration space is often handled by adopting the idea of differentiable neural architecture search. However, despite the superior search efficiency of the differentiable co-exploration, it faces a critical challenge of not being able to systematically satisfy hard constraints such as frame rate. To handle the hard constraint problem of differentiable co-exploration, we propose HDX, which…
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…
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…
The integration of behavioral phenomena into mechanistic models of cognitive function is a fundamental staple of cognitive science. Yet, researchers are beginning to accumulate increasing amounts of data without having the temporal or monetary resources to integrate these data into scientific theories. We seek to overcome these limitations by incorporating existing machine learning techniques into an open-source pipeline for the automated construction of quantitative models. This pipeline leverages the use of neural architecture search to automate the discovery of interpretable model architect…
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,…
Large pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown their effectiveness in various natural language processing tasks. However, the huge parameter size makes them difficult to be deployed in real-time applications that require quick inference with limited resources. Existing methods compress BERT into small models while such compression is task-independent, i.e., the same compressed BERT for all different downstream tasks. Motivated by the necessity and benefits of task-oriented BERT compression, we propose a novel compression method, AdaBERT, that leverages differentiable Neural Architec…
Arrhythmia is a cardiovascular disease that manifests irregular heartbeats. In arrhythmia detection, the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is an important diagnostic technique. However, manually evaluating ECG signals is a complicated and time-consuming task. With the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the evaluation process has been accelerated and the performance is improved. It is noteworthy that the performance of CNNs heavily depends on their architecture design, which is a complex process grounded on expert experience and trial-and-error. In this paper, we propose a novel …
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has now become one of the mainstream paradigms of neural architecture search. However, it largely suffers from the well-known performance collapse issue due to the aggregation of skip connections. It is thought to have overly benefited from the residual structure which accelerates the information flow. To weaken this impact, we propose to inject unbiased random noise to impede the flow. We name this novel approach NoisyDARTS. In effect, a network optimizer should perceive this difficulty at each training step…
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…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms are intended to remove the burden of manual neural network design, and have shown to be capable of designing excellent models for a variety of well-known problems. However, these algorithms require a variety of design parameters in the form of user configuration or hard-coded decisions which limit the variety of networks that can be discovered. This means that NAS algorithms do not eliminate model design tuning, they instead merely shift the burden of where that tuning needs to be applied. In this paper, we present SpiderNet, a hybrid differentiable-…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）
Accurately segmenting temporal frames of cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a crucial step in various real-time MRI guided cardiac interventions. To achieve fast and accurate visual assistance, there are strict requirements on the maximum latency and minimum throughput of the segmentation framework. State-of-the-art neural networks on this task are mostly hand-crafted to satisfy these constraints while achieving high accuracy. On the other hand, while existing literature have demonstrated the power of neural architecture search (NAS) in automatically identifying the best neural architect…
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…
