EGCN: ensemble graph convolutional network for neural architecture performance prediction

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is proposed to automatically search novel neural networks. Currently, one typical problem of NAS is that its computation requirements are too high to stand for most researchers. In fact, it consumes a lot of resources to train subnetworks for architecture search. If the performance of each subnetwork can be predicted accurately without training, the computational burden will be alleviated. Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is proven to have powerful capabilities for topological information perception and extraction. It is suitable to use GCN for predicting neural architecture performance which is related to its topology.In this paper, we treat GCN as the performance predictor with two improvements. First, a novel neural architecture data processing method named DATAPRO2 is designed to improve GCN's performance. Then, we propose EGCN, a model-based performance predictor which employs ensemble technique on GCN with DATAPRO2 to alleviate the overfitting issue caused by the imbalanced dataset for neural architecture performance prediction. Experimental results on CVPR-2021-NAS-TRACK2 dataset show that EGCN contributes to obtaining better predictive performance than vanilla GCN and other popular predictors.