The Need for Realistic NAS Benchmarks Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a logical next step in representation learning as it removes human bias from architecture design, similar to deep learning removing human bias from feature engineering. As such, NAS has experienced rapid growth in recent years, leading to state-of-the-art performance on many tasks. However, empirical […]

In a Nutshell In CMA-ES, the step size controls how fast or slow a population traverses through a search space. Large steps allow you to quickly skip over uninteresting areas (exploration), whereas small steps allow a more focused traversal of interesting areas (exploitation). Handcrafted heuristics usually trade off small and large steps given some measure […]

By A framework of ES-based limited episode’s length

Since our initial release of auto-sklearn 0.0.1 in May 2016 and the publication of the NeurIPS paper “Efficient and Robust Automated Machine Learning” in 2015, we have spent a lot of time on maintaining, refactoring and improving code, but also on new research. Now, we’re finally ready to share the next version of our flagship […]

By   Motivation When designing algorithms we want them to be as flexible as possible such that they can solve as many problems as possible. To solve a specific family of problems well, finding well-performing hyperparameter configurations requires us to either use extensive domain knowledge or resources. The second point is especially true if we […]

By Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a very hot topic in AutoML these days, and our group is very actively publishing in this area. We have seven NAS papers in 2019, which may make us one of the world’s most active groups in NAS (only closely surpassed by a small company called Google ;-). Here […]

By Understanding and Robustifying Differentiable Architecture Search Optimizing in the search of neural network architectures was initially defined as a discrete problem which intrinsically required to train and evaluate thousands of networks. This of course required huge amount of computational power, which was only possible for few institutions. One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) democratized this […]

By Neural architecture search (NAS) is currently one of the hottest topics in automated machine learning (see AutoML book), with a seemingly exponential increase in the number of papers written on the subject, see the figure above. While many NAS methods are fascinating (please see our survey article for an overview of the main trends […]

By Compared to the state of computer vision 20 years ago, deep learning has enabled more generic methodologies that can be applied to various tasks by automatically extracting meaningful features from the data. However, in practice those methodologies are not as generic as it looks at first glance. While standard neural networks may lead to […]

By Most work on neural architecture search (NAS, see our recent survey) solely optimizes for one criterion: high performance (measured in terms of accuracy). This often results in large and complex network architectures that cannot be used in real-world applications with several other important criteria including memory requirement, energy consumption and latency. The other problem […]