{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-redundancy-and-diversity-in-cell-based-1","title":"On Redundancy and Diversity in Cell-based Neural Architecture Search","arxiv_id":"2203.08887","date":"2022-03-16","proceeding":"ICLR 2022 4","authors":["Xingchen Wan","Binxin Ru","Pedro M. Esperança","Zhenguo Li"],"abstract":"Searching for the architecture cells is a dominant paradigm in NAS. However, little attention has been devoted to the analysis of the cell-based search spaces even though it is highly important for the continual development of NAS. In this work, we conduct an empirical post-hoc analysis of architectures from the popular cell-based search spaces and find that the existing search spaces contain a high degree of redundancy: the architecture performance is minimally sensitive to changes at large parts of the cells, and universally adopted designs, like the explicit search for a reduction cell, significantly increase the complexities but have very limited impact on the performance. Across architectures found by a diverse set of search strategies, we consistently find that the parts of the cells that do matter for architecture performance often follow similar and simple patterns. By explicitly constraining cells to include these patterns, randomly sampled architectures can match or even outperform the state of the art. These findings cast doubts into our ability to discover truly novel architectures in the existing cell-based search spaces, and inspire our suggestions for improvement to guide future NAS research. Code is available at https://github.com/xingchenwan/cell-based-NAS-analysis.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08887v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.08887v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-redundancy-and-diversity-in-cell-based-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/xingchenwan/cell-based-nas-analysis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"on-redundancy-and-diversity-in-cell-based-1","repo_url":"http://github.com//xingchenwan/cell-based-NAS-analysis","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"architecture-search","task_name":"Neural Architecture Search"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2203.08887","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.08887","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2203.08887"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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