Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling

We revisit the one-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) paradigm and analyze its advantages over existing NAS approaches. Existing one-shot method, however, is hard to train and not yet effective on large scale datasets like ImageNet. This work propose a Single Path One-Shot model to address the challenge in the training. Our central idea is to construct a simplified supernet, where all architectures are single paths so that weight co-adaption problem is alleviated. Training is performed by uniform path sampling. All architectures (and their weights) are trained fully and equally. Comprehensive experiments verify that our approach is flexible and effective. It is easy to train and fast to search. It effortlessly supports complex search spaces (e.g., building blocks, channel, mixed-precision quantization) and different search constraints (e.g., FLOPs, latency). It is thus convenient to use for various needs. It achieves start-of-the-art performance on the large dataset ImageNet.

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Datasets


Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet SPOS (ProxylessNAS (GPU) latency) Accuracy 75.3 # 88
MACs 465M # 116
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet SPOS (block search + channel search) Accuracy 74.7 # 94
MACs 328M # 97
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet SPOS (FBNet-C latency) Accuracy 75.1 # 90
MACs 375M # 108

Methods