A New Deep Neural Architecture Search Pipeline for Face Recognition

With the widespread popularity of electronic devices, the emergence of biometric technology has brought significant convenience to user authentication compared with the traditional password and mode unlocking. Among many biological characteristics, the face is a universal and irreplaceable feature with simple detection methods and good recognition accuracy. Face recognition is one of the main functions of electronic equipment propaganda. The previous work in this field mainly focused on converting loss function in traditional deep convolution neural networks without changing the network structure. With the development of AutoML, neural architecture search (NAS) has shown remarkable performance in image classification tasks. In this paper, we first propose a new deep neural architecture search pipeline combined with NAS technology and reinforcement learning strategy into face recognition. We quote the framework of NAS, which trains the child and controller networks alternately. At the same time, we optimize NAS by incorporating evaluation latency into rewards of reinforcement learning and utilize the policy gradient algorithm to search the architecture automatically with the cross-entropy loss. The network architectures we searched out have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in the large-scale face dataset, which achieved 98.77% top-1 in the MS-Celeb-1M dataset and 99.89% in LFW dataset with relatively small network size.