BNAS-v2: memory-efficient and performance-collapse-prevented broad neural architecture search

In this article, we propose BNAS-v2 to further improve the efficiency of broad neural architecture search (BNAS), which employs a broad convolutional neural network (BCNN) as the search space. In BNAS, the single-path sampling-updating strategy of an overparameterized BCNN leads to terrible unfair training issue, which restricts the efficiency improvement. To mitigate the unfair training issue, we employ a continuous relaxation strategy to optimize all paths of the overparameterized BCNN simultaneously. However, continuous relaxation leads to a performance collapse issue that leads to the unsatisfactory performance of the learned BCNN. For that, we propose the confident learning rate (CLR) and introduce the combination of partial channel connections and edge normalization. Experimental results show that 1) BNAS-v2 delivers state-of-the-art search efficiency on both CIFAR-10 (0.05 GPU days, which is 4× faster than BNAS) and ImageNet (0.19 GPU days) with better or competitive performance; 2) the above two solutions are effectively alleviating the performance collapse issue; and 3) BNAS-v2 achieves powerful generalization ability on multiple transfer tasks, e.g., MNIST, FashionMNIST, NORB, and SVHN. The code is available at https://github.com/zixiangding/BNASv2.