Automating Neural Architecture Design without Search

Neural structure search (NAS), as the mainstream approach to automate deep neural architecture design, has achieved much success in recent years. However, the performance estimation component adhering to NAS is often prohibitively costly, which leads to the enormous computational demand. Though a large number of efforts have been dedicated to alleviating this pain point, no consensus has been made yet on which is optimal. In this paper, we study the automated architecture design from a new perspective that eliminates the need to sequentially evaluate each neural architecture generated during algorithm execution. Specifically, the proposed approach is built by learning the knowledge of high-level experts in designing state-of-the-art architectures, and then the new architecture is directly generated upon the knowledge learned. We implemented the proposed approach by using a graph neural network for link prediction and acquired the knowledge from NAS-Bench-101. Compared to existing peer competitors, we found a competitive network with minimal cost. In addition, we also utilized the learned knowledge from NAS-Bench-101 to automate architecture design in the DARTS search space, and achieved 97.82% accuracy on CIFAR10, and 76.51% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet consuming only 2×10-4 GPU days. This also demonstrates the high transferability of the proposed approach, and can potentially lead to a new, more computationally efficient paradigm in this research direction.