Progressive Neural Architecture Search

We propose a new method for learning the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that is more efficient than recent state-of-the-art methods based on reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms. Our approach uses a sequential model-based optimization (SMBO) strategy, in which we search for structures in order of increasing complexity, while simultaneously learning a surrogate model to guide the search through structure space. Direct comparison under the same search space shows that our method is up to 5 times more efficient than the RL method of Zoph et al. (2018) in terms of number of models evaluated, and 8 times faster in terms of total compute. The structures we discover in this way achieve state of the art classification accuracies on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet PNAS Params 5.1 # 65
Image Classification ImageNet PNASNet-5 Top 1 Accuracy 82.9% # 445
Number of params 86.1M # 820
Operations per network pass 2.5G # 1
GFLOPs 50 # 423
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 PNAS + Accuracy (Val) 44.75 # 15

Methods