Learning Latent Architectural Distribution in Differentiable Neural Architecture Search via Variational Information Maximization

Existing differentiable neural architecture search approaches simply assume the architectural distribution on each edge is independent of each other, which conflicts with the intrinsic properties of architecture. In this paper, we view the architectural distribution as the latent representation of specific data points. Then we propose Variational Information Maximization Neural Architecture Search (VIM-NAS) to leverage a simple yet effective convolutional neural network to model the latent representation, and optimize for a tractable variational lower bound to the mutual information between the data points and the latent representations. VIM-NAS automatically learns a nearly one-hot distribution from a continuous distribution with extremely fast convergence speed, e.g., converging with one epoch. Experimental results demonstrate VIM-NAS achieves state-of-the-art performance on various search spaces, including DARTS search space, NAS-Bench-1shot1, NAS-Bench-201, and simplified search spaces S1-S4. Specifically, VIM-NAS achieves a top-1 error rate of 2.45% and 15.80% within 10 minutes on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, respectively, and a top-1 error rate of 24.0% when transferred to ImageNet.