Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search by Learning Search Space Partitions
This addresses the problem of expensive GPU costs for deep learning model designers using neural architecture search, representing an incremental improvement in optimization efficiency.
The paper tackles the challenge of high computational cost in multi-objective neural architecture search by implementing a novel optimizer based on LaMOO that learns search space partitions to focus on promising regions, achieving over 200% sample efficiency improvement compared to existing methods and demonstrating strong performance on CIFAR10 (97.36% accuracy with 1.62M parameters) and ImageNet (80.4% accuracy with 522M FLOPs).
Deploying deep learning models requires taking into consideration neural network metrics such as model size, inference latency, and #FLOPs, aside from inference accuracy. This results in deep learning model designers leveraging multi-objective optimization to design effective deep neural networks in multiple criteria. However, applying multi-objective optimizations to neural architecture search (NAS) is nontrivial because NAS tasks usually have a huge search space, along with a non-negligible searching cost. This requires effective multi-objective search algorithms to alleviate the GPU costs. In this work, we implement a novel multi-objectives optimizer based on a recently proposed meta-algorithm called LaMOO on NAS tasks. In a nutshell, LaMOO speedups the search process by learning a model from observed samples to partition the search space and then focusing on promising regions likely to contain a subset of the Pareto frontier. Using LaMOO, we observe an improvement of more than 200% sample efficiency compared to Bayesian optimization and evolutionary-based multi-objective optimizers on different NAS datasets. For example, when combined with LaMOO, qEHVI achieves a 225% improvement in sample efficiency compared to using qEHVI alone in NasBench201. For real-world tasks, LaMOO achieves 97.36% accuracy with only 1.62M #Params on CIFAR10 in only 600 search samples. On ImageNet, our large model reaches 80.4% top-1 accuracy with only 522M #FLOPs.