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Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning

Barret Zoph1, Quoc V. Le1
05 Nov 2016-arXiv: Learning-
TL;DR: This paper uses a recurrent network to generate the model descriptions of neural networks and trains this RNN with reinforcement learning to maximize the expected accuracy of the generated architectures on a validation set.
Abstract: Neural networks are powerful and flexible models that work well for many difficult learning tasks in image, speech and natural language understanding. Despite their success, neural networks are still hard to design. In this paper, we use a recurrent network to generate the model descriptions of neural networks and train this RNN with reinforcement learning to maximize the expected accuracy of the generated architectures on a validation set. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, our method, starting from scratch, can design a novel network architecture that rivals the best human-invented architecture in terms of test set accuracy. Our CIFAR-10 model achieves a test error rate of 3.65, which is 0.09 percent better and 1.05x faster than the previous state-of-the-art model that used a similar architectural scheme. On the Penn Treebank dataset, our model can compose a novel recurrent cell that outperforms the widely-used LSTM cell, and other state-of-the-art baselines. Our cell achieves a test set perplexity of 62.4 on the Penn Treebank, which is 3.6 perplexity better than the previous state-of-the-art model. The cell can also be transferred to the character language modeling task on PTB and achieves a state-of-the-art perplexity of 1.214.
Citations
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Proceedings Article
Quanlu Zhang1, Zhenhua Han1, Fan Yang1, Yuge Zhang1, Zhe Liu1, Mao Yang1, Lidong Zhou1 
01 Nov 2020
TL;DR: Retiarii is the first framework to support deep learning exploratory-training by introducing a key abstraction, Mutator, that connects the specifications of DNN model spaces and exploration strategies, while exposing the correlations between models for optimization.
Abstract: Traditional deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch support training on a single deep neural network(DNN) model, which involves computing the weights iteratively for the DNN model. Designing a DNN model for a task remains an experimental science and is typically a practice of deep learning model exploration, dovetailed with training and validation, aiming to find the best model among a set that yields the best result. Retrofitting such exploratory-training into the training process of a single DNN model, as supported by current deep learning frameworks, is unintuitive, cumber-some, and inefficient, because of the fundamental mismatch between exploring a set of models and training a single one. Retiarii is the first framework to support deep learning exploratory-training. In particular, Retiarii (i) provides a new programming interface to specify a DNN model space for exploration, as well as an interface to describe the exploration strategy that decides which order to instantiate and train models in, how to prioritize model training, and when to terminate training of certain models; (ii) offers a Just-In-Time (JIT)engine that instantiates models, manages the training of the instantiated models, gathers the information for the exploration strategy to consume, and executes the decisions accordingly;(iii) identifies the correlations between the instantiated models and develops a set of cross-model optimizations to improve the overall exploratory-training process. Retiarii does so by introducing a key abstraction, Mutator, that connects the specifications of DNN model spaces and exploration strategies, while exposing the correlations between models for optimization. As a result, Retiarii’s clean separation of DNN model space specification, exploration strategy, and cross-model optimizations, connected through the single mutator abstraction, leads to ease of programming, reuse of components, and vastly improved (up to 8.58x) overall exploratory-training efficiency.

15 citations


Cites background or methods from "Neural Architecture Search with Rei..."

  • ...To automate the design of neural networks, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) [39, 50, 59, 60, 69, 70] develops algorithms to discover the state-of-the-art neural model architecture....

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  • ...Similarly, an LSTM structure can be generalized to an RNN cell [69]....

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  • ...models [33, 67] and reinforcement learning [59, 69, 70])....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
07 May 2021
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of quantization on inference cost-quality tradeoff curves were investigated using ResNet as a case study and quantization-aware training was used to achieve state-of-the-art results on ImageNet.
Abstract: Quantization has become a popular technique to compress neural networks and reduce compute cost, but most prior work focuses on studying quantization without changing the network size. Many real-world applications of neural networks have compute cost and memory budgets, which can be traded off with model quality by changing the number of parameters. In this work, we use ResNet as a case study to systematically investigate the effects of quantization on inference compute cost-quality tradeoff curves. Our results suggest that for each bfloat16 ResNet model, there are quantized models with lower cost and higher ac-curacy; in other words, the bfloat16 compute cost-quality tradeoff curve is Pareto-dominated by the 4-bit and 8-bit curves, with models primarily quantized to 4-bit yielding the best Pareto curve. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results on ImageNet for 4-bit ResNet-50 with quantization-aware training, obtaining a top-1 eval accuracy of 77.09%. We demonstrate the regularizing effect of quantization by measuring the generalization gap. The quantization method we used is optimized for practicality: It requires little tuning and is designed with hardware capabilities in mind. Our work motivates further research into optimal numeric formats for quantization, as well as the development of machine learning accelerators supporting these formats. As part of this work, we contribute a quantization library written in JAX, which is open-sourced at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/aqt.

15 citations

Posted Content
Abstract: Machine learning is an established and frequently used technique in industry and academia but a standard process model to improve success and efficiency of machine learning applications is still missing. Project organizations and machine learning practitioners have a need for guidance throughout the life cycle of a machine learning application to meet business expectations. We therefore propose a process model for the development of machine learning applications, that covers six phases from defining the scope to maintaining the deployed machine learning application. The first phase combines business and data understanding as data availability oftentimes affects the feasibility of the project. The sixth phase covers state-of-the-art approaches for monitoring and maintenance of a machine learning applications, as the risk of model degradation in a changing environment is eminent. With each task of the process, we propose quality assurance methodology that is suitable to adress challenges in machine learning development that we identify in form of risks. The methodology is drawn from practical experience and scientific literature and has proven to be general and stable. The process model expands on CRISP-DM, a data mining process model that enjoys strong industry support but lacks to address machine learning specific tasks. Our work proposes an industry and application neutral process model tailored for machine learning applications with focus on technical tasks for quality assurance.

15 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
14 Jun 2020
TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce the concept of depthwise separable convolutions (BSConv) as an efficient building block for CNNs, which is motivated by quantitative analyses of kernel properties from trained models.
Abstract: We introduce blueprint separable convolutions (BSConv) as highly efficient building blocks for CNNs. They are motivated by quantitative analyses of kernel properties from trained models, which show the dominance of correlations along the depth axis. Based on our findings, we formulate a theoretical foundation from which we derive efficient implementations using only standard layers. Moreover, our approach provides a thorough theoretical derivation, interpretation, and justification for the application of depthwise separable convolutions (DSCs) in general, which have become the basis of many modern network architectures. Ultimately, we reveal that DSC-based architectures such as MobileNets implicitly rely on cross-kernel correlations, while our BSConv formulation is based on intra-kernel correlations and thus allows for a more efficient separation of regular convolutions. Extensive experiments on large-scale and fine-grained classification datasets show that BSConvs clearly and consistently improve MobileNets and other DSC-based architectures without introducing any further complexity. For fine-grained datasets, we achieve an improvement of up to 13.7 percentage points. In addition, if used as drop-in replacement for standard architectures such as ResNets, BSConv variants also outperform their vanilla counterparts by up to 9.5 percentage points on ImageNet.

15 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a framework for training agents to negotiate and form teams using deep reinforcement learning. But their method makes no assumptions about the specific negotiation protocol, and is instead completely experience driven.
Abstract: When autonomous agents interact in the same environment, they must often cooperate to achieve their goals. One way for agents to cooperate effectively is to form a team, make a binding agreement on a joint plan, and execute it. However, when agents are self-interested, the gains from team formation must be allocated appropriately to incentivize agreement. Various approaches for multi-agent negotiation have been proposed, but typically only work for particular negotiation protocols. More general methods usually require human input or domain-specific data, and so do not scale. To address this, we propose a framework for training agents to negotiate and form teams using deep reinforcement learning. Importantly, our method makes no assumptions about the specific negotiation protocol, and is instead completely experience driven. We evaluate our approach on both non-spatial and spatially extended team-formation negotiation environments, demonstrating that our agents beat hand-crafted bots and reach negotiation outcomes consistent with fair solutions predicted by cooperative game theory. Additionally, we investigate how the physical location of agents influences negotiation outcomes.

15 citations

References
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
27 Jun 2016
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously, which won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task.
Abstract: Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

123,388 citations

Proceedings Article
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: This work introduces Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments, and provides a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework.
Abstract: We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.

111,197 citations

Proceedings Article
04 Sep 2014
TL;DR: This work investigates the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting using an architecture with very small convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers.
Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

55,235 citations


"Neural Architecture Search with Rei..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Along with this success is a paradigm shift from feature designing to architecture designing, i.e., from SIFT (Lowe, 1999), and HOG (Dalal & Triggs, 2005), to AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012), VGGNet (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2014), GoogleNet (Szegedy et al., 2015), and ResNet (He et al., 2016a)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this article, a graph transformer network (GTN) is proposed for handwritten character recognition, which can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters.
Abstract: Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for online handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of graph transformer networks. A graph transformer network for reading a bank cheque is also described. It uses convolutional neural network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provide record accuracy on business and personal cheques. It is deployed commercially and reads several million cheques per day.

42,067 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
20 Jun 2005
TL;DR: It is shown experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection, and the influence of each stage of the computation on performance is studied.
Abstract: We study the question of feature sets for robust visual object recognition; adopting linear SVM based human detection as a test case. After reviewing existing edge and gradient based descriptors, we show experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks are all important for good results. The new approach gives near-perfect separation on the original MIT pedestrian database, so we introduce a more challenging dataset containing over 1800 annotated human images with a large range of pose variations and backgrounds.

31,952 citations


"Neural Architecture Search with Rei..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Along with this success is a paradigm shift from feature designing to architecture designing, i.e., from SIFT (Lowe, 1999), and HOG (Dalal & Triggs, 2005), to AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012), VGGNet (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2014), GoogleNet (Szegedy et al., 2015), and ResNet (He et al., 2016a)....

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