# Multi-Agent Automated Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09084/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (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)
- [Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08926/) (2017)
- [Gradient-based Hyperparameter Optimization through Reversible Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03492/) (2015)
- [Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01041/) (2017)
- [Optimizing Millions of Hyperparameters by Implicit Differentiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02590/) (2019)
- [PC-DARTS: Partial Channel Connections for Memory-Efficient Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05737/) (2019)
- [Fast AutoAugment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00397/) (2019)
- [Hyperparameter optimization with approximate gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02355/) (2016)
- [Truncated Back-propagation for Bilevel Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10667/) (2018)
- [Population Based Augmentation: Efficient Learning of Augmentation Policy Schedules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05393/) (2019)
- [Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimisation with Continuous Approximations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06240/) (2017)
- [Adversarial AutoAugment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11188/) (2019)
- [Faster AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Strategies using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06987/) (2019)
- [Practical Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization for Hyperparameter Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04703/) (2019)
- [DARTS-: Robustly Stepping out of Performance Collapse Without Indicators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01027/) (2020)
- [CARS: Continuous Evolution for Efficient Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04977/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Optimas: Optimizing Compound AI Systems with Globally Aligned Local Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03041/) (2025)
- [FlickerFusion: Intra-trajectory Domain Generalizing Multi-Agent RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15876/) (2024)
- [A Framework for Assessing AI Agent Decisions and Outcomes in AutoML Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22442/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose multi-agent automated machine learning (MA2ML) with the aim to effectively handle joint optimization of modules in automated machine learning (AutoML). MA2ML takes each machine learning module, such as data augmentation (AUG), neural architecture search (NAS), or hyper-parameters (HPO), as an agent and the final performance as the reward, to formulate a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. MA2ML explicitly assigns credit to each agent according to its marginal contribution to enhance cooperation among modules, and incorporates off-policy learning to improve search efficiency. Theoretically, MA2ML guarantees monotonic improvement of joint optimization. Extensive experiments show that MA2ML yields the state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy on ImageNet under constraints of computational cost, e.g., 79.7%/80.5% with FLOPs fewer than 600M/800M. Extensive ablation studies verify the benefits of credit assignment and off-policy learning of MA2ML.