Neural Graph Embedding for Neural Architecture Search

Abstract Existing neural architecture search (NAS) methods often operate in discrete or continuous spaces directly, which ignores the graphical topology knowledge of neural networks. This leads to suboptimal search performance and efficiency, given the factor that neural networks are essentially directed acyclic graphs (DAG). In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a novel idea of neural graph embedding (NGE). Specifically, we represent the building block (i.e. the cell) of neural networks with a neural DAG, and learn it by leveraging a Graph Convolutional Network to propagate and model the intrinsic topology information of network architectures. This results in a generic neural network representation integrable with different existing NAS frameworks. Extensive experiments show the superiority of NGE over the state-of-the-art methods on image classification and semantic segmentation.