In neural architecture search, the structure of the neural network to best model a given dataset is determined by an automated search process. Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), proposed by (2018), has recently received considerable attention due to its ability to find excellent architectures within a comparably short search time. In this work, which is motivated by the quest to further improve the learning speed of architecture search, we evaluate the learning progress of the controller which generates the architectures in ENAS. We measure the progress by comparing the architectures generated by it at different controller training epochs, where architectures are evaluated after having re-trained them from scratch. As a surprising result, we find that the learning curves are completely flat, i.e., there is no observable progress of the controller in terms of the performance of its generated architectures. This observation is consistent across the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets and two different search spaces. We conclude that the high quality of the models generated by ENAS is a result of the search space design rather than the controller training, and our results indicate that one-shot architecture design is an efficient alternative to architecture search by ENAS.
Our findings are consistent with the very recent results of @cite_11 , who have analyzed the behavior of the ENAS controller during search and found that its hidden state does not encode any properties of the generated architecture, providing an explanation of the observation made by @cite_7 that ENAS does not perform better than simple random architecture search. Our work is complementing that line of research by providing an experimental study of the learning progress of ENAS, demonstrating that good performance is already achieved before any search has taken place. This is also in consistent with recent results of @cite_9 , who have experimented with neural network generators for image recognition and have found that, without search, the randomly generated networks achieve state-of-the-art performance.
@cite_9 @cite_7 @cite_11
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Automatic methods for generating state-of-the-art neural network architectures without human experts have generated significant attention recently. This is because of the potential to remove human experts from the design loop which can reduce costs and decrease time to model deployment. Neural architecture search (NAS) techniques have improved significantly in their computational efficiency since the original NAS was proposed. This reduction in computation is enabled via weight sharing such as in Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS). However, recently a body of work confirms our discovery that ENAS does not do significantly better than random search with weight sharing, contradicting the initial claims of the authors. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon by investigating the interpretability of the ENAS controller's hidden state. We are interested in seeing if the controller embeddings are predictive of any properties of the final architecture - for example, graph properties like the number of connections, or validation performance. We find models sampled from identical controller hidden states have no correlation in various graph similarity metrics. This failure mode implies the RNN controller does not condition on past architecture choices. Importantly, we may need to condition on past choices if certain connection patterns prevent vanishing or exploding gradients. Lastly, we propose a solution to this failure mode by forcing the controller's hidden state to encode pasts decisions by training it with a memory buffer of previously sampled architectures. Doing this improves hidden state interpretability by increasing the correlation controller hidden states and graph similarity metrics. We propose Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), a fast and inexpensive approach for automatic model design. In ENAS, a controller learns to discover neural network architectures by searching for an optimal subgraph within a large computational graph. The controller is trained with policy gradient to select a subgraph that maximizes the expected reward on the validation set. Meanwhile the model corresponding to the selected subgraph is trained to minimize a canonical cross entropy loss. Thanks to parameter sharing between child models, ENAS is fast: it delivers strong empirical performances using much fewer GPU-hours than all existing automatic model design approaches, and notably, 1000x less expensive than standard Neural Architecture Search. On the Penn Treebank dataset, ENAS discovers a novel architecture that achieves a test perplexity of 55.8, establishing a new state-of-the-art among all methods without post-training processing. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, ENAS designs novel architectures that achieve a test error of 2.89 , which is on par with NASNet (, 2018), whose test error is 2.65 . Neural network architectures found by sophistic search algorithms achieve strikingly good test performance, surpassing most human-crafted network models by significant margins. Although computationally efficient, their design is often very complex, impairing execution speed. Additionally, finding models outside of the search space is not possible by design. While our space is still limited, we implement undiscoverable expert knowledge into the economic search algorithm Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS), guided by the design principles and architecture of ShuffleNet V2. While maintaining baseline-like 2.85 test error on CIFAR-10, our ShuffleNASNets are significantly less complex, require fewer parameters, and are two times faster than the ENAS baseline in a classification task. These models also scale well to a low parameter space, achieving less than 5 test error with little regularization and only 236K parameters. This paper addresses the difficult problem of finding an optimal neural architecture design for a given image classification task. We propose a method that aggregates two main results of the previous state-of-the-art in neural architecture search. These are, appealing to the strong sampling efficiency of a search scheme based on sequential model-based optimization (SMBO), and increasing training efficiency by sharing weights among sampled architectures. Sequential search has previously demonstrated its capabilities to find state-of-the-art neural architectures for image classification. However, its computational cost remains high, even unreachable under modest computational settings. Affording SMBO with weight-sharing alleviates this problem. On the other hand, progressive search with SMBO is inherently greedy, as it leverages a learned surrogate function to predict the validation error of neural architectures. This prediction is directly used to rank the sampled neural architectures. We propose to attenuate the greediness of the original SMBO method by relaxing the role of the surrogate function so it predicts architecture sampling probability instead. We demonstrate with experiments on the CIFAR-10 dataset that our method, denominated Efficient progressive neural architecture search (EPNAS), leads to increased search efficiency, while retaining competitiveness of found architectures.