U-Boost NAS: Utilization-Boosted Differentiable Neural Architecture Search

Abstract

Finding optimal channel dimensions (i.e., the number of filters in DNN layers) is essential to design DNNs that perform well under computational resource constraints. Recent work in neural architecture search aims at automating the optimization of the DNN model implementation. However, existing neural architecture search methods for channel dimensions rely on fixed search spaces, which prevents achieving an efficient and fully automated solution. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable neural architecture search method with an efficient dynamic channel allocation algorithm to enable a flexible search space for channel dimensions. We show that the proposed framework is able to find DNN architectures that are equivalent to previous methods in task accuracy and inference latency for the CIFAR-10 dataset with an improvement of 1.3−1.7× in GPU-hours and 1.5−1.7× in the memory requirements during the architecture search stage. Moreover, the proposed frameworks do not require a well-engineered search space a priori, which is an important step towards fully automated design of DNN architectures.