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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 ArticleDOI
25 Apr 2022
TL;DR: This work proposes a novel Contrastive Sharing Recommendation model in MTL learning (CSRec), where each task in CSRec learns from the subnet by the independent parameter mask as in sparse sharing models, but a contrastive mask is carefully designed to evaluate the contribution of the parameter to a specific task.
Abstract: Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has attracted increasing attention in recommender systems. A crucial challenge in MTL is to learn suitable shared parameters among tasks and to avoid negative transfer of information. The most recent sparse sharing models use independent parameter masks, which only activate useful parameters for a task, to choose the useful subnet for each task. However, as all the subnets are optimized in parallel for each task independently, it is faced with the problem of conflict between parameter gradient updates (i.e, parameter conflict problem). To address this challenge, we propose a novel Contrastive Sharing Recommendation model in MTL learning (CSRec). Each task in CSRec learns from the subnet by the independent parameter mask as in sparse sharing models, but a contrastive mask is carefully designed to evaluate the contribution of the parameter to a specific task. The conflict parameter will be optimized relying more on the task which is more impacted by the parameter. Besides, we adopt an alternating training strategy in CSRec, making it possible to self-adaptively update the conflict parameters by fair competitions. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world large scale datasets, i.e., Tencent Kandian, Ali-CCP and Census-income, showing better effectiveness of our model over state-of-the-art methods for both offline and online MTL recommendation scenarios.

7 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors proposed a new neural architecture search space, Cell-based Neural Fabric (CNF), to learn micro as well as macro neural architecture using a differentiable search strategy.

7 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: FReLU as mentioned in this paper extends ReLU and PReLU to a 2D activation by adding a negligible overhead of spatial condition, achieving a pixel-wise modeling capacity in a simple way, capturing complicated visual layouts with regular convolutions.
Abstract: We present a conceptually simple but effective funnel activation for image recognition tasks, called Funnel activation (FReLU), that extends ReLU and PReLU to a 2D activation by adding a negligible overhead of spatial condition. The forms of ReLU and PReLU are y = max(x, 0) and y = max(x, px), respectively, while FReLU is in the form of y = max(x,T(x)), where T(x) is the 2D spatial condition. Moreover, the spatial condition achieves a pixel-wise modeling capacity in a simple way, capturing complicated visual layouts with regular convolutions. We conduct experiments on ImageNet, COCO detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, showing great improvements and robustness of FReLU in the visual recognition tasks. Code is available at this https URL.

7 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
28 Jun 2021
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS) from the view of the advanced techniques and provide a comprehensive understanding of EAs' roles for the readers and focus themselves on ENAS.
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been frequently and widely applied for intelligent systems such as object detection, natural language understanding and speech recognition. Given a specific problem, we always aim to construct the most suitable DNN to solve it, which requires choosing the most appropriate model architecture and seeking the best model parameters values. However, most existing works focus on model parameters learning under the assumption that the model architecture can be manually specified as per prior knowledge and/or trial-and-error experimentation. To overcome this problem, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely used to design model architectures automatically. Further, EAs have been used for neural network optimization for more than 30 years. Therefore, in this paper, we review the evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS) from the view of the advanced techniques. We hope this work can provide a comprehensive understanding of EAs’ roles for the readers and focus themselves on ENAS.

7 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
06 Jun 2021
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors formulate the MMMT model and heterogeneous hardware implementation co-design as a differentiable optimization problem, with the objective of improving the solution quality and reducing the overall power consumption and critical path latency.
Abstract: Optimizing the quality of result (QoR) and the quality of service (QoS) of AI-empowered autonomous systems simultaneously is very challenging. First, there are multiple input sources, e.g., multimodal data from different sensors, requiring diverse data preprocessing, sensor fusion, and feature aggregation. Second, there are multiple tasks that require various AI models to run simultaneously, e.g., perception, localization, and control. Third, the computing and control system is heterogeneous, composed of hardware components with varied features, such as embedded CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and dedicated accelerators. Therefore, autonomous systems essentially require multi-modal multitask (MMMT) learning which must be aware of hardware performance and implementation strategies. While MMMT learning has been attracting intensive research interests, its applications in autonomous systems are still underexplored. In this paper, we first discuss the opportunities of applying MMMT techniques in autonomous systems, and then discuss the unique challenges that must be solved. In addition, we discuss the necessity and opportunities of MMMT model and hardware co-design, which is critical for autonomous systems especially with power/resource-limited or heterogeneous platforms. We formulate the MMMT model and heterogeneous hardware implementation co-design as a differentiable optimization problem, with the objective of improving the solution quality and reducing the overall power consumption and critical path latency. We advocate for further explorations of MMMT in autonomous systems and software/hardware co-design solutions.

7 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)....

    [...]

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)....

    [...]