A Novel Evolutionary Algorithm for Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel evolutionary algorithm for neural architecture search, applicable to global search spaces. The algorithm's architectural representation organizes the topology in multiple hierarchical modules, while the design process exploits this representation, in order to explore the search space. We also employ a curation system, which promotes the utilization of well performing sub-structures to subsequent generations. We apply our method to Fashion-MNIST and NAS-Bench101, achieving accuracies of $93.2\%$ and $94.8\%$ respectively in a relatively small number of generations.