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Automatic Design of Deep Networks with Neural Blocks

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Abstract

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great successes in many areas, such as cognitive computation, pattern recognition, and computer vision. Although many hand-crafted deep networks have been proposed in the literature, designing a well-behaved neural network for a specific application requires high-level expertise yet. Hence, the automatic architecture design of DNNs has become a challenging and important problem. In this paper, we propose a new reinforcement learning method, whose action policy is to select neural blocks and construct deep networks. We define the action search space with three types of neural blocks, i.e., dense block, residual block, and inception-like block. Additionally, we have also designed several variants for the residual and inception-like blocks. The optimal network is automatically learned by a Q-learning agent, which is iteratively trained to generate well-performed deep networks. To evaluate the proposed method, we have conducted experiments on three datasets, MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR-10, for image classification applications. Compared with existing hand-crafted and auto-generated neural networks, our auto-designed neural network delivers promising results. Moreover, the proposed reinforcement learning algorithm for deep networks design only runs on one GPU, demonstrating much higher efficiency than most of the previous deep network search approaches.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant 2016YFC1401004, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 41706010 and 61876155, the Science and Technology Program of Qingdao under Grant No. 17-3-3-20-nsh, the CERNET Innovation Project under Grant No. NGII20170416, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China. In addition, we would like to thank Tao Li for his helpful comments and discussions. We also would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful reviews.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, China

    Guoqiang Zhong, Wencong Jiao & Wei Gao

  2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, SIP, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Kaizhu Huang

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  1. Guoqiang Zhong
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  2. Wencong Jiao
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Correspondence to Guoqiang Zhong.

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Zhong, G., Jiao, W., Gao, W. et al. Automatic Design of Deep Networks with Neural Blocks. Cogn Comput 12, 1–12 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-019-09677-5

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