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arXiv · 2003.04276

How to Train Your Super-Net: An Analysis of Training Heuristics in Weight-Sharing NAS

Kaicheng Yu·Rene Ranftl·Mathieu Salzmann
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Abstract

Weight sharing promises to make neural architecture search (NAS) tractable even on commodity hardware. Existing methods in this space rely on a diverse set of heuristics to design and train the shared-weight backbone network, a.k.a. the super-net. Since heuristics and hyperparameters substantially vary across different methods, a fair comparison between them can only be achieved by systematically analyzing the influence of these factors. In this paper, we therefore provide a systematic evaluation of the heuristics and hyperparameters that are frequently employed by weight-sharing NAS algorithms. Our analysis uncovers that some commonly-used heuristics for super-net training negatively impact the correlation between super-net and stand-alone performance, and evidences the strong influence of certain hyperparameters and architectural choices. Our code and experiments set a strong and reproducible baseline that future works can build on.

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Kaicheng Yu, Rene Ranftl, Mathieu Salzmann. 2020-06-17. How to Train Your Super-Net: An Analysis of Training Heuristics in Weight-Sharing NAS. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04276

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