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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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Posted Content
TL;DR: DPP-Net is proposed: Device-aware Progressive Search for Pareto-optimal Neural Architectures, optimizing for both device-related and device-agnostic objectives, which achieves better performances: higher accuracy & shorter inference time on various devices.
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in Neural Architectural Search (NAS) have achieved state-of-the-art performances in applications such as image classification and language modeling. However, these techniques typically ignore device-related objectives such as inference time, memory usage, and power consumption. Optimizing neural architecture for device-related objectives is immensely crucial for deploying deep networks on portable devices with limited computing resources. We propose DPP-Net: Device-aware Progressive Search for Pareto-optimal Neural Architectures, optimizing for both device-related (e.g., inference time and memory usage) and device-agnostic (e.g., accuracy and model size) objectives. DPP-Net employs a compact search space inspired by current state-of-the-art mobile CNNs, and further improves search efficiency by adopting progressive search (Liu et al. 2017). Experimental results on CIFAR-10 are poised to demonstrate the effectiveness of Pareto-optimal networks found by DPP-Net, for three different devices: (1) a workstation with Titan X GPU, (2) NVIDIA Jetson TX1 embedded system, and (3) mobile phone with ARM Cortex-A53. Compared to CondenseNet and NASNet (Mobile), DPP-Net achieves better performances: higher accuracy and shorter inference time on various devices. Additional experimental results show that models found by DPP-Net also achieve considerably-good performance on ImageNet as well.

119 citations


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

  • ...Seminal work by [6] proposed “Neural Architecture Search (NAS)” using REINFORCE algorithm [20] to learn a network architecture called “controller” RNN that generates a sequence of actions representing the architecture of a CNN....

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  • ...Recently, automating neural architecture search (NAS) has drawn lots of attention from both industry and academia [5, 6]....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jun 2021
TL;DR: Diverse Branch Block (DBB) as mentioned in this paper enhances the representational capacity of a single convolution by combining diverse branches of different scales and complexities to enrich the feature space, including sequences of convolutions, multiscale convolutions and average pooling.
Abstract: We propose a universal building block of Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) to improve the performance without any inference-time costs. The block is named Diverse Branch Block (DBB), which enhances the representational capacity of a single convolution by combining diverse branches of different scales and complexities to enrich the feature space, including sequences of convolutions, multiscale convolutions, and average pooling. After training, a DBB can be equivalently converted into a single conv layer for deployment. Unlike the advancements of novel ConvNet architectures, DBB complicates the training-time microstructure while maintaining the macro architecture, so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement for regular conv layers of any architecture. In this way, the model can be trained to reach a higher level of performance and then transformed into the original inference-time structure for inference. DBB improves ConvNets on image classification (up to 1.9% higher top-1 accuracy on ImageNet), object detection and semantic segmentation. The PyTorch code and models are released at https://github.com/DingXiaoH/DiverseBranchBlock.

119 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
15 Aug 2019
TL;DR: This paper investigates the current state of AutoML tools aiming to automate repetitive tasks in ML pipelines, such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and prediction result analysis.
Abstract: There has been considerable growth and interest in industrial applications of machine learning (ML) in recent years. ML engineers, as a consequence, are in high demand across the industry, yet improving the efficiency of ML engineers remains a fundamental challenge. Automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a way to save time and effort on repetitive tasks in ML pipelines, such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and prediction result analysis. In this paper, we investigate the current state of AutoML tools aiming to automate these tasks. We conduct various evaluations of the tools on many datasets, in different data segments, to examine their performance, and compare their advantages and disadvantages on different test cases.

118 citations


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

  • ...Google Cloud AutoML and Auto-keras conduct neural network search [19], [20], for both image and text data....

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Book ChapterDOI
08 Sep 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a sampling policy that adapts to the state of the network, which is being trained, so that new permutations are sampled according to their expected utility for updating the convolutional feature representation.
Abstract: Self-supervised learning of convolutional neural networks can harness large amounts of cheap unlabeled data to train powerful feature representations As surrogate task, we jointly address ordering of visual data in the spatial and temporal domain The permutations of training samples, which are at the core of self-supervision by ordering, have so far been sampled randomly from a fixed preselected set Based on deep reinforcement learning we propose a sampling policy that adapts to the state of the network, which is being trained Therefore, new permutations are sampled according to their expected utility for updating the convolutional feature representation Experimental evaluation on unsupervised and transfer learning tasks demonstrates competitive performance on standard benchmarks for image and video classification and nearest neighbor retrieval

118 citations

Book ChapterDOI
08 Sep 2018
TL;DR: DP-Net as discussed by the authors employs a compact search space inspired by current state-of-the-art mobile CNNs, and further improves search efficiency by adopting progressive search (Liu et al. 2017).
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in Neural Architectural Search (NAS) have achieved state-of-the-art performances in applications such as image classification and language modeling. However, these techniques typically ignore device-related objectives such as inference time, memory usage, and power consumption. Optimizing neural architecture for device-related objectives is immensely crucial for deploying deep networks on portable devices with limited computing resources. We propose DPP-Net: Device-aware Progressive Search for Pareto-optimal Neural Architectures, optimizing for both device-related (e.g., inference time and memory usage) and device-agnostic (e.g., accuracy and model size) objectives. DPP-Net employs a compact search space inspired by current state-of-the-art mobile CNNs, and further improves search efficiency by adopting progressive search (Liu et al. 2017). Experimental results on CIFAR-10 are poised to demonstrate the effectiveness of Pareto-optimal networks found by DPP-Net, for three different devices: (1) a workstation with Titan X GPU, (2) NVIDIA Jetson TX1 embedded system, and (3) mobile phone with ARM Cortex-A53. Compared to CondenseNet and NASNet (Mobile), DPP-Net achieves better performances: higher accuracy & shorter inference time on various devices. Additional experimental results show that models found by DPP-Net also achieve considerably-good performance on ImageNet as well.

117 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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