Papers › DSNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search without Parameter Retraining

DSNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search without Parameter Retraining

21 Feb 2020CVPR 2020 6arXiv:2002.09128archive 2025-07-28

Shoukang Hu, Sirui Xie, Hehui Zheng, Chunxiao Liu, Jianping Shi, Xunying Liu, Dahua Lin

If NAS methods are solutions, what is the problem? Most existing NAS methods require two-stage parameter optimization. However, performance of the same architecture in the two stages correlates poorly. In this work, we propose a new problem definition for NAS, task-specific end-to-end, based on this observation. We argue that given a computer vision task for which a NAS method is expected, this definition can reduce the vaguely-defined NAS evaluation to i) accuracy of this task and ii) the total computation consumed to finally obtain a model with satisfying accuracy. Seeing that most existing methods do not solve this problem directly, we propose DSNAS, an efficient differentiable NAS framework that simultaneously optimizes architecture and parameters with a low-biased Monte Carlo estimate. Child networks derived from DSNAS can be deployed directly without parameter retraining. Comparing with two-stage methods, DSNAS successfully discovers networks with comparable accuracy (74.4%) on ImageNet in 420 GPU hours, reducing the total time by more than 34%. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/SNAS-Series/SNAS-Series.

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Tasks

Neural Architecture Search

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, CIFAR-100 DSNAS Accuracy (Val) 31.01 #40 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Neural Architecture Search NAS-Bench-201, ImageNet-16-120 DSNAS Accuracy (Val) 41.07 #48 of 49 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Differentiable NAS

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