Papers › Simple And Efficient Architecture Search for Convolutional Neural Networks
Simple And Efficient Architecture Search for Convolutional Neural Networks
Thomas Elsken, Jan-Hendrik Metzen, Frank Hutter
Neural networks have recently had a lot of success for many tasks. However, neural network architectures that perform well are still typically designed manually by experts in a cumbersome trial-and-error process. We propose a new method to automatically search for well-performing CNN architectures based on a simple hill climbing procedure whose operators apply network morphisms, followed by short optimization runs by cosine annealing. Surprisingly, this simple method yields competitive results, despite only requiring resources in the same order of magnitude as training a single network. E.g., on CIFAR-10, our method designs and trains networks with an error rate below 6% in only 12 hours on a single GPU; training for one day reduces this error further, to almost 5%.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections