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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: A new understanding of complexity, as well as the need to distinguish between the reactive nature of the artificial and the anticipatory nature ofThe living are suggested as practical responses to the challenges posed by machine theology.
Abstract: Computation has changed the world more than any previous expressions of knowledge. In its particular algorithmic embodiment, it offers a perspective, within which the digital computer (one of many possible) exercises a role reminiscent of theology. Since it is closed to meaning, algorithmic digital computation can at most mimic the creative aspects of life. AI, in the perspective of time, proved to be less an acronym for artificial intelligence and more of automating tasks associated with intelligence. The entire development led to the hypostatized role of the machine: outputting nothing else but reality, including that of the humanity that made the machine happen. The convergence machine called deep learning is only the latest form through which the deterministic theology of the machine claims more than what extremely effective data processing actually is. A new understanding of complexity, as well as the need to distinguish between the reactive nature of the artificial and the anticipatory nature of the living are suggested as practical responses to the challenges posed by machine theology.

3 citations


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

  • ...Neural networks “learn learning” (Andrychowicz et al 2016) and design new networks (Zoph and Le 2016)....

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Posted Content
TL;DR: This work forms the multi-layered network as a Markov chain, introducing a training method that comprises training the network gradually and using layer-wise gradient clipping, which resulted in improvements in state-of-the-art architectures operating in language modeling tasks.
Abstract: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) achieve state-of-the-art results in many sequence-to-sequence modeling tasks. However, RNNs are difficult to train and tend to suffer from overfitting. Motivated by the Data Processing Inequality (DPI), we formulate the multi-layered network as a Markov chain, introducing a training method that comprises training the network gradually and using layer-wise gradient clipping. We found that applying our methods, combined with previously introduced regularization and optimization methods, resulted in improvements in state-of-the-art architectures operating in language modeling tasks.

3 citations


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

  • ...0 Neural Architecture Search with base 8 + WT [23] 54M 62....

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  • ...5 Neural Architecture Search with base 8 [23] 32M 67....

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  • ...4 Neural Architecture Search with base 8 + WT [23] 25M 64....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: CFNet as discussed by the authors proposes a cascade fusion network (CFNet) to fuse multi-scale features more deeply and effectively with a large proportion of parameters of the whole backbone, which makes it possible to fuse features more effectively.
Abstract: Multi-scale features are essential for dense prediction tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Existing state-of-the-art methods usually first extract multi-scale features by a classification backbone and then fuse these features by a lightweight module (e.g. the fusion module in FPN). However, we argue that it may not be sufficient to fuse the multi-scale features through such a paradigm, because the parameters allocated for feature fusion are limited compared with the heavy classification backbone. In order to address this issue, we propose a new architecture named Cascade Fusion Network (CFNet) for dense prediction. Besides the stem and several blocks used to extract initial high-resolution features, we introduce several cascaded stages to generate multi-scale features in CFNet. Each stage includes a sub-backbone for feature extraction and an extremely lightweight transition block for feature integration. This design makes it possible to fuse features more deeply and effectively with a large proportion of parameters of the whole backbone. Extensive experiments on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation validated the effectiveness of the proposed CFNet. Codes will be available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/CFNet.

3 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: Different from previously proposed Equation Learner (EQL) networks, GMEQL applies continuous relaxation to the network structure via the Gumbel-Max trick and introduces two types of trainable parameters: structure parameters and regression parameters.
Abstract: Most of the neural networks (NNs) learned via state-of-the-art machine learning techniques are black-box models. For a widespread success of machine learning in science and engineering, it is important to develop new NN architectures to effectively extract high-level mathematical knowledge from complex datasets. Motivated by this understanding, this paper develops a new NN architecture called the Gumbel-Max Equation Learner (GMEQL) network. Different from previously proposed Equation Learner (EQL) networks, GMEQL applies continuous relaxation to the network structure via the Gumbel-Max trick and introduces two types of trainable parameters: structure parameters and regression parameters. This paper also proposes a two-stage training process with new techniques to train structure parameters in both online and offline settings based on an elite repository. On 8 benchmark symbolic regression problems, GMEQL is experimentally shown to outperform several cutting-edge machine learning approaches.

3 citations


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

  • ...Our proposed use of the Gumbel-Max trick in GMEQL is closely related to several existing methods for neural architecture search (NAS) [Zoph and Le, 2016; Liu et al., 2018; Xie et al., 2018]....

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  • ...Different from SNAS, we extend EQL with the Gumbel-Max trick to facilitate gradient-based learning of mathematical expressions....

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  • ...Particularly, the stochastic NAS (SNAS) algorithm exploits this trick to optimize all connections within every cell of a large NN through gradient-descent search [Xie et al., 2018]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as mentioned in this paper proposed a genetic network programming based fast evolutionary learning (GNP-FEL) to optimize CNN architecture and hyperparameters, which can build diverse network structures and make network parameters selfevolve.
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) show great performance in lots of applications. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is one of the classic DNNs, and various modified CNNs have been brought up, such as DenseNet, GoogleNet, ResNet, etc. For diverse tasks, a unique structure of CNN may show its advantage. However, how to design an effective CNN model for a practical task is a puzzle. In this paper, we model the architecture optimization of CNN as an optimization problem and design a Genetic network programming based Fast evolutionary learning (GNP-FEL) to optimize CNN. GNP-FEL contains three main ideas: First GNP is adopted to optimize CNN architecture and hyperparameters, which can build diverse network structures and make network parameters selfevolve; Second multi-objective optimization is designed by balancing both CNN model efficiency and structure compactness; Last a novel incremental training method is proposed to train offspring CNN models in GNP, which is capable of reducing time complexity sharply. Experiments have validated that GNP-FEL can quickly evolve a CNN classifier with a sufficiently compact architecture. And the classifier has a comparable classification effect to state-ofthe-art CNN model.

3 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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