Youhei Akimoto, Shinichi Shirakawa, Nozomu Yoshinari, Kento Uchida, Shota Saito, and Kouhei Nishida: Adaptive Stochastic Natural Gradient Method for One-Shot Neural Architecture Search, Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Vol. 97 of PMLR, pp. 171-180 (2019). ※ Acceptance Rate: 22.6% ≒ 773 / 3424

## Abstract

High sensitivity of neural architecture search (NAS) methods against their input such as step-size (i.e., learning rate) and search space prevents practitioners from applying them out-of-the-box to their own problems, albeit its purpose is to automate a part of tuning process. Aiming at a fast, robust, and widely-applicable NAS, we develop a generic optimization framework for NAS. We turn a coupled optimization of connection weights and neural architecture into a differentiable optimization by means of stochastic relaxation. It accepts arbitrary search space (widely-applicable) and enables to employ a gradient-based simultaneous optimization of weights and architecture (fast). We propose a stochastic natural gradient method with an adaptive step-size mechanism built upon our theoretical investigation (robust). Despite its simplicity and no problem-dependent parameter tuning, our method exhibited near state-of-the-art performances with low computational budgets both on image classification and inpainting tasks.

## Citation

@InProceedings{pmlr-v97-akimoto19a,
title = {{Adaptive Stochastic Natural Gradient Method for One-Shot Neural Architecture Search}},
author = {Akimoto, Youhei and Shirakawa, Shinichi and Yoshinari, Nozomu and Uchida, Kento and Saito, Shota and Nishida, Kouhei},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {171--180},
year = {2019},
editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan},
volume = {97},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
address = {Long Beach, California, USA},
month = {09--15 Jun},
publisher = {PMLR},
url = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/akimoto19a.html},
}