Papers › Densely Connected Search Space for More Flexible Neural Architecture Search

Densely Connected Search Space for More Flexible Neural Architecture Search

23 Jun 2019CVPR 2020 6arXiv:1906.09607archive 2025-07-28

Jiemin Fang, Yuzhu Sun, Qian Zhang, Yuan Li, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang

Neural architecture search (NAS) has dramatically advanced the development of neural network design. We revisit the search space design in most previous NAS methods and find the number and widths of blocks are set manually. However, block counts and block widths determine the network scale (depth and width) and make a great influence on both the accuracy and the model cost (FLOPs/latency). In this paper, we propose to search block counts and block widths by designing a densely connected search space, i.e., DenseNAS. The new search space is represented as a dense super network, which is built upon our designed routing blocks. In the super network, routing blocks are densely connected and we search for the best path between them to derive the final architecture. We further propose a chained cost estimation algorithm to approximate the model cost during the search. Both the accuracy and model cost are optimized in DenseNAS. For experiments on the MobileNetV2-based search space, DenseNAS achieves 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with only 361MB FLOPs and 17.9ms latency on a single TITAN-XP. The larger model searched by DenseNAS achieves 76.1% accuracy with only 479M FLOPs. DenseNAS further promotes the ImageNet classification accuracies of ResNet-18, -34 and -50-B by 1.5%, 0.5% and 0.3% with 200M, 600M and 680M FLOPs reduction respectively. The related code is available at https://github.com/JaminFong/DenseNAS.

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conv1x1 JaminFong/DenseNAS/models/operations.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d9def42110729a85 · report
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Tasks

Image ClassificationNeural Architecture Search

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet DenseNAS-A Top 1 Accuracy 75.9% #927 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet DenseNAS-Large FLOPs 479M #94 of 135 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search ImageNet DenseNAS-Large Top-1 Error Rate 23.9 #94 of 135 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: DenseNAS, DenseNAS-A, DenseNAS-B

1x1 ConvolutionAdamAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationConvolutionCosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDenseNASDenseNAS-ADenseNAS-BDenseNAS-CDepthwise ConvolutionDepthwise Separable ConvolutionGlobal Average PoolingInverted Residual BlockPointwise ConvolutionRandom Horizontal FlipRandom Resized CropSGD with MomentumSoftmaxWeight Decay

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