FBNetV5: Neural Architecture Search for Multiple Tasks in One Run

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been widely adopted to design accurate and efficient image classification models. However, applying NAS to a new computer vision task still requires a huge amount of effort. This is because 1) previous NAS research has been over-prioritized on image classification while largely ignoring other tasks; 2) many NAS works focus on optimizing task-specific components that cannot be favorably transferred to other tasks; and 3) existing NAS methods are typically designed to be "proxyless" and require significant effort to be integrated with each new task's training pipelines. To tackle these challenges, we propose FBNetV5, a NAS framework that can search for neural architectures for a variety of vision tasks with much reduced computational cost and human effort. Specifically, we design 1) a search space that is simple yet inclusive and transferable; 2) a multitask search process that is disentangled with target tasks' training pipeline; and 3) an algorithm to simultaneously search for architectures for multiple tasks with a computational cost agnostic to the number of tasks. We evaluate the proposed FBNetV5 targeting three fundamental vision tasks -- image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Models searched by FBNetV5 in a single run of search have outperformed the previous stateof-the-art in all the three tasks: image classification (e.g., +1.3% ImageNet top-1 accuracy under the same FLOPs as compared to FBNetV3), semantic segmentation (e.g., +1.8% higher ADE20K val. mIoU than SegFormer with 3.6x fewer FLOPs), and object detection (e.g., +1.1% COCO val. mAP with 1.2x fewer FLOPs as compared to YOLOX).

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Semantic Segmentation ADE20K FBNetV5 Validation mIoU 40.4 # 210
Image Classification ImageNet FBNetV5-F-CLS Top 1 Accuracy 84.1% # 325
GFLOPs 2.1 # 151
Image Classification ImageNet FBNetV5-C-CLS Top 1 Accuracy 82.6% # 474
GFLOPs 1 # 103
Image Classification ImageNet FBNetV5-AC-CLS Top 1 Accuracy 78.4% # 768
GFLOPs 0.280 # 25
Image Classification ImageNet FBNetV5-A-CLS Top 1 Accuracy 81.7% # 563
GFLOPs 0.685 # 81
Image Classification ImageNet FBNetV5-AR-CLS Top 1 Accuracy 77.2% # 813
GFLOPs 0.215 # 17
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet FBNetV5-A-CLS Top-1 Error Rate 18.3 # 9
Accuracy 81.7 # 6
FLOPs 685M # 131
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet FBNetV5-AR-CLS Top-1 Error Rate 22.8 # 68
Accuracy 77.2 # 55
FLOPs 215M # 112
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet FBNetV5 Top-1 Error Rate 18.2 # 7
FLOPs 726M # 134
Image Classification ImageNet FBNetV5 Top 1 Accuracy 81.8% # 553
GFLOPs 0.726 # 89

Methods