DARTS-PRIME: Regularization and Scheduling Improve Constrained Optimization in Differentiable NAS

22 Jun 2021  ·  Kaitlin Maile, Erwan Lecarpentier, Hervé Luga, Dennis G. Wilson ·

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) is a recent neural architecture search (NAS) method based on a differentiable relaxation. Due to its success, numerous variants analyzing and improving parts of the DARTS framework have recently been proposed. By considering the problem as a constrained bilevel optimization, we present and analyze DARTS-PRIME, a variant including improvements to architectural weight update scheduling and regularization towards discretization. We propose a dynamic schedule based on per-minibatch network information to make architecture updates more informed, as well as proximity regularization to promote well-separated discretization. Our results in multiple domains show that DARTS-PRIME improves both performance and reliability, comparable to state-of-the-art in differentiable NAS.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Neural Architecture Search CIFAR-10 DARTS-PRIME Top-1 Error Rate 2.62% # 29
Search Time (GPU days) 0.5 # 15
Parameters 3.7M # 28
Neural Architecture Search CIFAR-100 DARTS-PRIME Percentage Error 17.44 # 10
PARAMS 3.16M # 7

Methods