Stacked BNAS: Rethinking Broad Convolutional Neural Network for Neural Architecture Search

Different from other deep scalable architecture-based neural architecture search (NAS) approaches, broad NAS (BNAS) proposes a broad scalable architecture which consists of convolution and enhancement blocks, dubbed broad convolutional neural network (BCNN), as the search space for amazing efficiency improvement. BCNN reuses the topologies of cells in the convolution block so that BNAS can employ few cells for efficient search. Moreover, multiscale feature fusion and knowledge embedding are proposed to improve the performance of BCNN with shallow topology. However, BNAS suffers some drawbacks: 1) insufficient representation diversity for feature fusion and enhancement and 2) time consumption of knowledge embedding design by human experts. This article proposes Stacked BNAS, whose search space is a developed broad scalable architecture named Stacked BCNN, with better performance than BNAS. On the one hand, Stacked BCNN treats mini BCNN as a basic block to preserve comprehensive representation and deliver powerful feature extraction ability. For multiscale feature enhancement, each mini BCNN feeds the outputs of deep and broad cells to the enhancement cell. For multiscale feature fusion, each mini BCNN feeds the outputs of deep, broad and enhancement cells to the output node. On the other hand, knowledge embedding search (KES) is proposed to learn appropriate knowledge embeddings in a differentiable way. Moreover, the basic unit of KES is an over-parameterized knowledge embedding module that consists of all possible candidate knowledge embeddings. Experimental results show that: 1) Stacked BNAS obtains better performance than BNAS-v2 on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet; 2) the proposed KES algorithm contributes to reducing the parameters of the learned architecture with satisfactory performance; and 3) Stacked BNAS delivers a state-of-the-art efficiency of 0.02 GPU days.