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Title: AtomNAS: Fine-Grained End-to-End Neural Architecture Search

Paper content:
Designing of search space is a critical problem for neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms.
We propose a fine-grained search space comprised of atomic blocks, a minimal search unit much smaller than the ones used in recent NAS algorithms.
This search space facilitates direct selection of channel numbers and kernel sizes in convolutions.
In addition, we propose a resource-aware architecture search algorithm which dynamically selects atomic blocks during training.
The algorithm is further accelerated by a dynamic network shrinkage technique.
Instead of a  search-and-retrain two-stage paradigm, our method can simultaneously search and train the target architecture in an end-to-end manner.
Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under several FLOPS configurations on ImageNet with a negligible searching cost.
We open our entire codebase at: https://github.com/meijieru/AtomNAS.
Human-designed neural networks are already surpassed by machine-designed ones.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become the mainstream approach to discover efficient and powerful network structures (Zoph & Le (2017) ; Pham et al. (2018) ; ; ).
Although the tedious searching process is conducted by machines, humans still involve extensively in the design of the NAS algorithms.
Designing of search spaces is critical for NAS algorithms and different choices have been explored.
Cai et al. (2019) and Wu et al. (2019) utilize supernets with multiple choices in each layer to accommodate a sampled network on the GPU.
Chen et al. (2019b) progressively grow the depth of the supernet and remove unnecessary blocks during the search.
Tan & Le (2019a) propose to search the scaling factor of image resolution, channel multiplier and layer numbers in scenarios with different computation budgets.
Stamoulis et al. (2019a) propose to use different kernel sizes in each layer of the supernet and reuse the weights of larger kernels for small kernels.
; Tan & Le (2019b) adopts Inverted Residuals with Linear Bottlenecks (MobileNetV2 block) (Sandler et al., 2018) , a building block with light-weighted depth-wise convolutions for highly efficient networks in mobile scenarios.
However, the proposed search spaces generally have only a small set of choices for each block.
DARTS and related methods Chen et al., 2019b; use around 10 different operations between two network nodes.
; Cai et al. (2019) ; Wu et al. (2019) ; Stamoulis et al. (2019a) search the expansion ratios in the MobileNetV2 block but still limit them to a few discrete values.
We argue that more fine-grained search space is essential to find optimal neural architectures.
Specifically, the searched building block in a supernet should be as small as possible to generate the most diversified model structures.
We revisit the architectures of state-of-the-art networks ; Tan & Le (2019b) ; He et al. (2016) ) and find a commonly used building block: convolution -channel-wise operation -convolution.
We reinterpret such structure as an ensemble of computationally independent blocks, which we call atomic blocks.
This new formulation enables a much larger and more fine-grained search space.
Starting from a supernet which is built upon atomic blocks, the search for exact channel numbers and various operations can be achieved by selecting a subset of the atomic blocks.
For the efficient exploration of the new search space, we propose a NAS algorithm named AtomNAS to conduct architecture search and network training simultaneously.
Specifically, an importance factor is introduced to each atomic block.
A penalty term proportional to the computation cost of the atomic block is enforced on the network.
By jointly learning the importance factors along with the weights of the network, AtomNAS selects the atomic blocks which contribute to the model capacity with relatively small computation cost.
Training on large supernets is computationally demanding.
We observe that the scaling factors of many atomic blocks permanently vanish at the early stage of model training.
We propose a dynamic network shrinkage technique which removes the ineffective atomic blocks on the fly and greatly reduce the computation cost of AtomNAS.
In our experiment, our method achieves 75.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset around 360M FLOPs, which is 0.9% higher than state-of-the-art model (Stamoulis et al., 2019a) .
By further incorporating additional modules, our method achieves 77.6% top-1 accuracy.
It outperforms MixNet by 0.6% using 363M FLOPs, which is a new state-of-the-art under the mobile scenario.
In summary, the major contributions of our work are:
1. We propose a fine-grained search space which includes the exact number of channels and mixed operations (e.g., combination of different convolution kernels).
2. We propose an efficient end-to-end NAS algorithm named AtomNAS which can simultaneously search the network architecture and train the final model.
No finetuning is needed after AtomNAS finishes.
3. With the proposed search space and AtomNAS, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet dataset under mobile setting.
In this paper, we revisit the common structure, i.e., two convolutions joined by a channel-wise operation, and reformulate it as an ensemble of atomic blocks.
This perspective enables a much larger and more fine-grained search space.
For efficiently exploring the huge fine-grained search space, we propose an end-to-end algorithm named AtomNAS, which conducts architecture search and network training jointly.
The searched networks achieve significantly better accuracy than previous state-of-the-art methods while using small extra cost.
Table 4 : Comparision with baseline backbones on COCO object detection and instance segmentation.
Cls denotes the ImageNet top-1 accuracy; detect-mAP and seg-mAP denotes mean average precision for detection and instance segmentation on COCO dataset.
The detection results of baseline models are from Stamoulis et al. (2019b) .
SinglePath+ (Stamoulis et al., 2019b) In this section, we assess the performance of AtomNAS models as feature extractors for object detection and instance segmentation on COCO dataset (Lin et al., 2014) .
We first pretrain AtomNAS models (without Swish activation function (Ramachandran et al., 2018) and Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module (Hu et al., 2018) ) on ImageNet, use them as drop-in replacements for the backbone in the Mask-RCNN model (He et al., 2017a) by building the detection head on top of the last feature map, and finetune the model on COCO dataset.
We use the open-source code MMDetection (Chen et al., 2019a) .
All the models are trained on COCO train2017 with batch size 16 and evaluated on COCO val2017.
Following the schedule used in the open-source implementation of TPU-trained Mask-RCNN , the learning rate starts at 0.02 and decreases by a scale of 10 at 15-th and 20th epoch respectively.
The models are trained for 23 epochs in total.
Table 4 compares the results with other baseline backbone models.
The detection results of baseline models are from Stamoulis et al. (2019b) .
We can see that all three AtomNAS models outperform the baselines on object detection task.
The results demonstrate that our models have better transferability than the baselines, which may due to mixed operations, a.k.a multi-scale are here, are more important to object detection and instance segmentation.
https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/mask_ rcnn

assistant: text: A new state-of-the-art on Imagenet for mobile setting