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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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Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: A novel neuro-evolutionary metaheuristic called EXAMM is utilized to conduct extensive experiments evolving RNNs consisting of a suite of memory cells and simple neurons, with and without deep recurrent connections, with results showing that networks withDeep recurrent connections perform significantly better than those without.
Abstract: Neural architecture search poses one of the most difficult problems for statistical learning, given the incredibly vast architectural search space. This problem is further compounded for recurrent neural networks (RNNs), where every node in an architecture can be connected to any other node via recurrent connections which pass information from previous passes through the RNN via a weighted connection. Most modern-day RNNs focus on recurrent connections which pass information from the immediately preceding pass by utilizing gated constructs known as memory cells; however, connections farther back in time, or deep recurrent connections, are also possible. A novel neuro-evolutionary metaheuristic called EXAMM is utilized to conduct extensive experiments evolving RNNs consisting of a suite of memory cells and simple neurons, with and without deep recurrent connections. These experiments evolved and trained 10.56 million RNNs, with results showing that networks with deep recurrent connections perform significantly better than those without, and in some cases the best evolved RNNs consist of only simple neurons and deep recurrent connections. These results strongly suggest that utilizing complex recurrent connectivity patterns in RNNs deserves further study and also showcases the strong potential for using neuro-evolutionary metaheuristic algorithms as tools for understanding and training effective RNNs.

1 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this article, a multi-objective neural architecture search (NAS) for two-tiered edge-cloud hierarchical systems is presented, where the performance objectives are refashioned to consider the wireless communication parameters.
Abstract: Edge-Cloud hierarchical systems employing intelligence through Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) endure the dilemma of workload distribution within them. Previous solutions proposed to distribute workloads at runtime according to the state of the surroundings, like the wireless conditions. However, such conditions are usually overlooked at design time. This paper addresses this issue for DNN architectural design by presenting a novel methodology, LENS, which administers multi-objective Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for two-tiered systems, where the performance objectives are refashioned to consider the wireless communication parameters. From our experimental search space, we demonstrate that LENS improves upon the traditional solution's Pareto set by 76.47% and 75% with respect to the energy and latency metrics, respectively.

1 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: A dual frame-rate system that brings in the best of both worlds: A modulator stream that executes an expensive models robust to environmental factors at a low frame rate to extract slowly changing features describing the environment, and a prediction stream thatexecute a light-weight model at real-time to extract transient signals that describes particularities of the current frame.
Abstract: One of the greatest challenges in the design of a real-time perception system for autonomous driving vehicles and drones is the conflicting requirement of safety (high prediction accuracy) and efficiency. Traditional approaches use a single frame rate for the entire system. Motivated by the observation that the lack of robustness against environmental factors is the major weakness of compact ConvNet architectures, we propose a dual frame-rate system that brings in the best of both worlds: A modulator stream that executes an expensive models robust to environmental factors at a low frame rate to extract slowly changing features describing the environment, and a prediction stream that executes a light-weight model at real-time to extract transient signals that describes particularities of the current frame. The advantage of our design is validated by our extensive empirical study, showing that our solution leads to consistent improvements using a variety of backbone architecture choice and input resolutions. These findings suggest multiple frame-rate systems as a promising direction in designing efficient perception for autonomous agents.

1 citations


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

  • ...There has been a growing interest in designing compact architectures, for example through architecture search [53, 30, 35, 54, 52, 23], network compression [14, 5, 33] and manual architecture design [15, 48, 37]....

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  • ...Fast Neural Networks Architecture search [53, 30, 35, 54, 52, 23], network compression [14, 5, 33] and novel manual design [15, 48, 37] are popular methods in designing fast neural network architectures....

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Posted Content
TL;DR: This paper conducts experiments on an image classification task using ImageNet dataset and shows that some data orderings are better than others in terms of obtaining higher classification accuracies.
Abstract: The success stories from deep learning models increase every day spanning different tasks from image classification to natural language understanding. With the increasing popularity of these models, scientists spend more and more time finding the optimal parameters and best model architectures for their tasks. In this paper, we focus on the ingredient that feeds these machines: the data. We hypothesize that the data ordering affects how well a model performs. To that end, we conduct experiments on an image classification task using ImageNet dataset and show that some data orderings are better than others in terms of obtaining higher classification accuracies. Experimental results show that independent of model architecture, learning rate and batch size, ordering of the data significantly affects the outcome. We show these findings using different metrics: NDCG, accuracy @ 1 and accuracy @ 5. Our goal here is to show that not only parameters and model architectures but also the data ordering has a say in obtaining better results.

1 citations


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

  • ...However, Zoph and Le [25] claimed that their study is more general and more flexible than any previous study on NAS....

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  • ...They focus on a recurrent neural network to generate the model descriptions while training it using recurrent neural networks (RNN) as a controller to decide if a child network is an optimal one or not [25]....

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  • ...An example of a NAS study is from Zaph and Le [25]....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
15 Jun 2018
TL;DR: This work focuses on using log data associated with training deep learning models to perform model search by predicting performance metrics for untrained models, and presents two preliminary methods that rely only on information present in logs to predict these characteristics for different architectures.
Abstract: Using machine learning to analyze data often results in developer exhaust -- code, logs, or metadata that do not define the learning algorithm but are byproducts of the data analytics pipeline. We study how the rich information present in developer exhaust can be used to approximately solve otherwise complex tasks. Specifically, we focus on using log data associated with training deep learning models to perform model search by predicting performance metrics for untrained models. Instead of designing a different model for each performance metric, we present two preliminary methods that rely only on information present in logs to predict these characteristics for different architectures. We introduce (i) a nearest neighbor approach with a hand-crafted edit distance metric to compare model architectures and (ii) a more generalizable, end-to-end approach that trains an LSTM using model architectures and associated logs to predict performance metrics of interest. We perform model search optimizing for best validation accuracy, degree of overfitting, and best validation accuracy given a constraint on training time. Our approaches can predict validation accuracy within 1.37% error on average, while the baseline achieves 4.13% by using the performance of a trained model with the closest number of layers. When choosing the best performing model given constraints on training time, our approaches select the top-3 models that overlap with the true top-3 models 82% of the time, while the baseline only achieves this 54% of the time. Our preliminary experiments hold promise for how developer exhaust can help learn models that can approximate various complex tasks efficiently.

1 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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