TPC-NAS: Sub-Five-Minute Neural Architecture Search for Image Classification, Object-Detection, and Super-Resolution

Ming-shan Huang, Tzi-Dar Chiueh

Keywords: NAS, Neural Architecture Search, Image Classification, Object Detection, Super Resolution

Abstract: Neural network models have become more sophisticated with the explosive development of AI and its applications. Automating the model search process is essential to explore a full range of neural architectures for satisfactory performance. However, most current NAS algorithms consume significant time and computing resources, and many cater only to image classification applications. This paper proposes the total path count (TPC) score, which requires only simple calculation based on the architecture information, as an efficient accuracy predictor. TPC score is not only simple to come by but also very effective. The Kendall rank correlation coefficient of the TPC scores and the accuracies of 20 architectures for the CIFAR100 problem is as high as 0.87. This paper also proposes TPC-NAS, a zero-shot NAS method leveraging the novel TPC score. TPC-NAS requires no training and inference, and can complete a NAS task for Imagenet and other vision applications in less than five CPU minutes. Then, we apply TPC-NAS to image classification, object detection, and super-resolution applications for further validation. In image classification, TPC-NAS finds an architecture that achieves 76.4% top-1 accuracy in ImageNet with 355M FLOPs, outperforming other NAS solutions. Starting with yolov4-p5, TPC-NAS comes up with a high-performance model with at least 2% mAP improvement over other NAS algorithms’ results in object detection. Finally, in the super-resolution application, TPC-NAS discovers a model with fewer than 300K parameters and generates images with 32.09dB PSNR in the Urban100 dataset. These three experiments convince us that the TPC-NAS method can swiftly deliver high-quality CNN architectures in diverse applications. The related source code is available at https://github.com/TPC-NAS/TPC.

Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.

No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.

Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics

Submission Guidelines: Yes

Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: General Machine Learning (ie none of the above)