Evolving Neural Network's Weights at Imagenet Scale

Guodong DU, Senqiao Yang, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Haoyang Li, Wei Chen, Keren Li, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh

Primary Area: optimization

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Keywords: optimization, evolution

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Abstract: Building upon evolutionary theory, this work proposes a deep neural network optimization framework based on evolutionary algorithms to enhance existing pre-trained models, usually trained by backpropagation (BP). Specifically, we consider a pre-trained model to generate an initial population of deep neural networks (DNNs) using BP with distinct hyper-parameters, and subsequently simulate the evolutionary process of DNNs. Moreover, we enhance the evolutionary process, by developing an adaptive differential evolution (DE) algorithm, SA-SHADE-tri-ensin, which integrates the strengths of two DE algorithms, SADE and SHADE, with trigonometric mutation and sinusoidal change of mutation rate. Compared to existing work (e.g., ensembling, weight averaging and evolution inspired techniques), the proposed method better enhanced existing pre-trained deep neural network models (e.g., ResNet variants) on large-scale ImageNet. Our analysis reveals that DE with an adaptive trigonometric mutation strategy yields improved offspring with higher success rates and the importance of diversity in the parent population. Hence, the underlying mechanism is worth further investigation and has implications for developing advanced neuro-evolutionary optimizers.

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Submission Number: 690