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Neural Architecture Search on ImageNet in Four GPU Hours: A Theoretically Inspired Perspective [PDF]

Wuyang Chen, Xinyu Gong, Zhangyang Wang

In ICLR 2021.

Overview

We present TE-NAS, the first published training-free neural architecture search method with extremely fast search speed (no gradient descent at all!) and high-quality performance.

Highlights:

• Trainig-free and label-free NAS: we achieved extreme fast neural architecture search without a single gradient descent.
• Bridging the theory-application gap: We identified two training-free indicators to rank the quality of deep networks: the condition number of their NTKs, and the number of linear regions in their input space.
• SOTA: TE-NAS achieved extremely fast search speed (one 1080Ti, 20 minutes on NAS-Bench-201 space / four hours on DARTS space on ImageNet) and maintains competitive accuracy.

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 16.04
• Python 3.6.9
• CUDA 10.1 (lower versions may work but were not tested)
• NVIDIA GPU + CuDNN v7.3

This repository has been tested on GTX 1080Ti. Configurations may need to be changed on different platforms.

Installation

• Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/chenwydj/TENAS.git
cd TENAS

• Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

0. Prepare the dataset

• Please follow the guideline here to prepare the CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet dataset, and also the NAS-Bench-201 database.
• Remember to properly set the TORCH_HOME and data_paths in the prune_launch.py.

1. Search

NAS-Bench-201 Space

python prune_launch.py --space nas-bench-201 --dataset cifar10 --gpu 0
python prune_launch.py --space nas-bench-201 --dataset cifar100 --gpu 0
python prune_launch.py --space nas-bench-201 --dataset ImageNet16-120 --gpu 0

DARTS Space (NASNET)

python prune_launch.py --space darts --dataset cifar10 --gpu 0
python prune_launch.py --space darts --dataset imagenet-1k --gpu 0

2. Evaluation

• For architectures searched on nas-bench-201, the accuracies are immediately available at the end of search (from the console output).
• For architectures searched on darts, please use DARTS_evaluation for training the searched architecture from scratch and evaluation.

Citation

@inproceedings{chen2020tenas,
  title={Neural Architecture Search on ImageNet in Four GPU Hours: A Theoretically Inspired Perspective},
  author={Chen, Wuyang and Gong, Xinyu and Wang, Zhangyang},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2021}
}

Acknowledgement

• Code base from NAS-Bench-201.