Andrey Khorlin

Zalán Borsos, Andrey Khorlin, Andrea Gesmundo

Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) have produced state-of-the-art architectures on several tasks. NAS shifts the efforts of human experts from developing novel architectures directly to designing architecture search spaces and methods to explore them efficiently. The search space definition captures prior knowledge about the properties of the architectures and it is crucial for the complexity and the performance of the search algorithm. However, different search space definitions require restarting the learning process from scratch. We propose a novel agent based on the Transformer that supports joint training and efficient transfer of prior knowledge between multiple search spaces and tasks.

Krzysztof Maziarz, Mingxing Tan, Andrey Khorlin et al.

Neural Architecture Search has shown potential to automate the design of neural networks. Deep Reinforcement Learning based agents can learn complex architectural patterns, as well as explore a vast and compositional search space. On the other hand, evolutionary algorithms offer higher sample efficiency, which is critical for such a resource intensive application. In order to capture the best of both worlds, we propose a class of Evolutionary-Neural hybrid agents (Evo-NAS). We show that the Evo-NAS agent outperforms both neural and evolutionary agents when applied to architecture search for a suite of text and image classification benchmarks. On a high-complexity architecture search space for image classification, the Evo-NAS agent surpasses the accuracy achieved by commonly used agents with only 1/3 of the search cost.