SI-VDNAS: Semi-Implicit Variational Dropout for Hierarchical One-shot Neural Architecture Search

Bayesian methods have improved the interpretability and stability of neural architecture search (NAS). In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic approach, namely Semi-Implicit Variational Dropout one-shot Neural Architecture Search (SI-VDNAS), that leverages semi-implicit variational dropout to support architecture search with variable operations and edges. SI-VDNAS achieves stable training that would not be affected by the over-selection of skip-connect operation. Experimental results demonstrate that SI-VDNAS finds a convergent architecture with only 2.7 MB parameters within 0.8 GPU-days and can achieve 2.60% top-1 error rate on CIFAR-10. The convergent architecture can obtain a top-1 error rate of 16.20% and 25.6% when transferred to CIFAR-100 and ImageNet (mobile setting).