# Evolutionary Neural Cascade Search across Supernetworks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04011 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04011/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10486/) (2018)
- [Searching for A Robust Neural Architecture in Four GPU Hours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04465/) (2019)
- [Random Search and Reproducibility for Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07638/) (2019)
- [BigNAS: Scaling Up Neural Architecture Search with Big Single-Stage Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11142/) (2020)
- [How Powerful are Performance Predictors in Neural Architecture Search?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01177/) (2021)
- [Single-Path NAS: Designing Hardware-Efficient ConvNets in less than 4 Hours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02877/) (2019)
- [NSGANetV2: Evolutionary Multi-Objective Surrogate-Assisted Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10396/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Neural Architecture Search via Self-Evaluated Template Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05733/) (2019)
- [AttentiveNAS: Improving Neural Architecture Search via Attentive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09011/) (2020)
- [Neural Architecture Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05859/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To achieve excellent performance with modern neural networks, having the right network architecture is important. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) concerns the automatic discovery of task-specific network architectures. Modern NAS approaches leverage supernetworks whose subnetworks encode candidate neural network architectures. These subnetworks can be trained simultaneously, removing the need to train each network from scratch, thereby increasing the efficiency of NAS. A recent method called Neural Architecture Transfer (NAT) further improves the efficiency of NAS for computer vision tasks by using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to find high-quality subnetworks of a supernetwork pretrained on ImageNet. Building upon NAT, we introduce ENCAS - Evolutionary Neural Cascade Search. ENCAS can be used to search over multiple pretrained supernetworks to achieve a trade-off front of cascades of different neural network architectures, maximizing accuracy while minimizing FLOPs count. We test ENCAS on common computer vision benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet) and achieve Pareto dominance over previous state-of-the-art NAS models up to 1.5 GFLOPs. Additionally, applying ENCAS to a pool of 518 publicly available ImageNet classifiers leads to Pareto dominance in all computation regimes and to increasing the maximum accuracy from 88.6% to 89.0%, accompanied by an 18% decrease in computation effort from 362 to 296 GFLOPs. Our code is available at https://github.com/AwesomeLemon/ENCAS