Multiple Population Alternate Evolution Neural Architecture Search

The effectiveness of Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) is influenced by the design of the search space. Nevertheless, common methods including the global search space, scalable search space and hierarchical search space have certain limitations. Specifically, the global search space requires a significant amount of computational resources and time, the scalable search space sacrifices the diversity of network structures and the hierarchical search space increases the search cost in exchange for network diversity. To address above limitation, we propose a novel paradigm of searching neural network architectures and design the Multiple Population Alternate Evolution Neural Architecture Search (MPAE), which can achieve module diversity with a smaller search cost. MPAE converts the search space into L interconnected units and sequentially searches the units, then the above search of the entire network be cycled several times to reduce the impact of previous units on subsequent units. To accelerate the population evolution process, we also propose the the population migration mechanism establishes an excellent migration archive and transfers the excellent knowledge and experience in the migration archive to new populations. The proposed method requires only 0.3 GPU days to search a neural network on the CIFAR dataset and achieves the state-of-the-art results.