Deep Learning Architecture Search by Neuro-Cell-Based Evolution with Function-Preserving Mutations

The design of convolutional neural network architectures for a new image data set is a laborious and computational expensive task which requires expert knowledge. We propose a novel neuro-evolutionary technique to solve this problem without human interference. Our method assumes that a convolutional neural network architecture is a sequence of neuro-cells and keeps mutating them using function-preserving operations. This novel combination of approaches has several advantages. We define the network architecture by a sequence of repeating neuro-cells which reduces the search space complexity. Furthermore, these cells are possibly transferable and can be used in order to arbitrarily extend the complexity of the network. Mutations based on function-preserving operations guarantee better parameter initialization than random initialization such that less training time is required per network architecture. Our proposed method finds within 12 GPU hours neural network architectures that can achieve a classification error of about 4% and 24% with only 5.5 and 6.5 million parameters on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, respectively. In comparison to competitor approaches, our method provides similar competitive results but requires orders of magnitudes less search time and in many cases less network parameters.