An effective surrogate-assisted rank method for evolutionary neural architecture search

Evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS) is able to automatically design high-performed architectures of deep neural networks (DNNs) for specific tasks. In recent years, surrogate models have gained significant traction because they can estimate the performance of neural architectures, avoiding excessive computational costs for training. However, most existing surrogate models primarily predict the performance of architectures directly or predict pairwise comparison relationships, which makes it challenging to obtain the rank of a group of architectures when training samples are limited. To address this problem, we propose TCMR-ENAS, an effective triple-competition model-assisted rank method for ENAS. TCMR-ENAS employs a novel triple-competition surrogate model combined with a score-based fitness evaluation method to predict group performance rank. Moreover, a progressive online learning method is proposed to enhance the predictive performance of the triple-competition surrogate model in the framework of modified genetic search. To validate the effectiveness of TCMR-ENAS, we conducted a series of experiments on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench and NAS-Bench-301, respectively. Experimental results show that TCMR-ENAS can achieve better performance with lower computational resources. The accuracies of searched architectures achieve the best results compared with those of the state-of-the-art methods with limited training samples. In addition, the factors that may influence the effectiveness of TCMR-ENAS are explored in the ablation studies.