# Self-Supervised Neural Architecture Search for Imbalanced Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08580 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08580/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01041/) (2017)
- [PC-DARTS: Partial Channel Connections for Memory-Efficient Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05737/) (2019)
- [Progressive Differentiable Architecture Search: Bridging the Depth Gap between Search and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12760/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Value of Labels for Improving Class-Imbalanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07529/) (2020)
- [MedMNIST Classification Decathlon: A Lightweight AutoML Benchmark for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14925/) (2020)
- [Auto-Keras: An Efficient Neural Architecture Search System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10282/) (2018)
- [Fair DARTS: Eliminating Unfair Advantages in Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12126/) (2019)
- [FairNAS: Rethinking Evaluation Fairness of Weight Sharing Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01845/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01500/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Unsupervised Graph Neural Architecture Search with Disentangled Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05064/) (2024)
- [Boarding for ISS: Imbalanced Self-Supervised: Discovery of a Scaled Autoencoder for Mixed Tabular Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15790/) (2024)
- [Fair Differentiable Neural Network Architecture Search for Long-Tailed Data with Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16949/) (2024)
- [Neural Architecture Search of Sample Reweighting Networks for Complex Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22991/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) provides state-of-the-art results when trained on well-curated datasets with annotated labels. However, annotating data or even having balanced number of samples can be a luxury for practitioners from different scientific fields, e.g., in the medical domain. To that end, we propose a NAS-based framework that bears the threefold contributions: (a) we focus on the self-supervised scenario, i.e., where no labels are required to determine the architecture, and (b) we assume the datasets are imbalanced, (c) we design each component to be able to run on a resource constrained setup, i.e., on a single GPU (e.g. Google Colab). Our components build on top of recent developments in self-supervised learning~citepzbontar2021barlow, self-supervised NAS~citepkaplan2020self and extend them for the case of imbalanced datasets. We conduct experiments on an (artificially) imbalanced version of CIFAR-10 and we demonstrate our proposed method outperforms standard neural networks, while using 27× less parameters. To validate our assumption on a naturally imbalanced dataset, we also conduct experiments on ChestMNIST and COVID-19 X-ray. The results demonstrate how the proposed method can be used in imbalanced datasets, while it can be fully run on a single GPU. Code is available hrefhttps://github.com/TimofeevAlex/ssnasimbalancedhere.