Venue: ICLR 2022 Track Blog

Reviews:

final_score: rating: 4: Ok but not good enough - rejection
review_content: This blog post summarizes 3 main papers which have had significant impact in the field of NAS. 
1. DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search, Liu et al ICLR 2019
2. Understanding and Robustifying DARTS, Zela et al ICLR 2020
3. Rethinking Architecture Selection in Differentiable NAS, Wang, et al ICLR 2021 (Best Paper award)

2 shows that unless very careful regularization is undertaken (by taking into account the condition number of the Jacobian of the architecture parameters) in bilevel optimization, the net result is degenerate configurations with only skip connections. The proposed early stopping mechanism by monitoring the condition number is quite effective.

3 shows that it is the way DARTS does architecture selection after bilevel optimization is not effective and magnitude of architecture parameters actually does not correspond to the better architecture. By taking inspiration from "unrolled estimation" by Viet et al, they show that a simple perturbation-based technique for extracting final architecture is much more effective.

This blog post while doing a good job summarizing these important papers unfortunately does not add any insight/further understanding or well-developed guidance for future research directions. In the last paragraph there is a glimmer of interesting directions provided but they are unfortunately not well-developed. If the authors had actually run new experiments or developed (at least partially) new theory along the lines in the last paragraph it would have been indeed more useful. I also understand that this is first instance of a blog post series but from what I understand the bar for an ICLR blog post is a bit higher. 

I will also defer to the AC's who have a broader view to calibrate my assessment. 
review_title: Summarizes a sequence of 3 papers. Not much added value.

Decision: Reject