Neighborhood-Aware Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Xiaofang Wang, Shengcao Cao, Mengtian Li, Kris M. Kitani
Keywords: Neural architecture search, Flat minima
Abstract: Existing neural architecture search (NAS) methods often return an architecture with good search performance but generalizes poorly to the test setting. To achieve better generalization, we propose a novel neighborhood-aware NAS formulation to identify flat-minima architectures in the search space, with the assumption that flat minima generalize better than sharp minima. The phrase ``flat-minima architecture'' refers to architectures whose performance is stable under small perturbations in the architecture (\emph{e.g.}, replacing a convolution with a skip connection). Our formulation takes the ``flatness'' of an architecture into account by aggregating the performance over the neighborhood of this architecture. We demonstrate a principled way to apply our formulation to existing search algorithms, including sampling-based algorithms and gradient-based algorithms. To facilitate the application to gradient-based algorithms, we also propose a differentiable representation for the neighborhood of architectures. Based on our formulation, we propose neighborhood-aware random search (NA-RS) and neighborhood-aware differentiable architecture search (NA-DARTS). Notably, by simply augmenting DARTS~\cite{liu2018darts} with our formulation, NA-DARTS finds architectures that perform better or on par with those found by state-of-the-art NAS methods on established benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIAFR-100 and ImageNet.