Paper ID: 2306.15390

DCP-NAS: Discrepant Child-Parent Neural Architecture Search for 1-bit CNNs

Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Xianbin Cao, Li'an Zhuo, Baochang Zhang, Tian Wang, Guodong Guo

Neural architecture search (NAS) proves to be among the effective approaches for many tasks by generating an application-adaptive neural architecture, which is still challenged by high computational cost and memory consumption. At the same time, 1-bit convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with binary weights and activations show their potential for resource-limited embedded devices. One natural approach is to use 1-bit CNNs to reduce the computation and memory cost of NAS by taking advantage of the strengths of each in a unified framework, while searching the 1-bit CNNs is more challenging due to the more complicated processes involved. In this paper, we introduce Discrepant Child-Parent Neural Architecture Search (DCP-NAS) to efficiently search 1-bit CNNs, based on a new framework of searching the 1-bit model (Child) under the supervision of a real-valued model (Parent). Particularly, we first utilize a Parent model to calculate a tangent direction, based on which the tangent propagation method is introduced to search the optimized 1-bit Child. We further observe a coupling relationship between the weights and architecture parameters existing in such differentiable frameworks. To address the issue, we propose a decoupled optimization method to search an optimized architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DCP-NAS achieves much better results than prior arts on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. In particular, the backbones achieved by our DCP-NAS achieve strong generalization performance on person re-identification and object detection.

Submitted: Jun 27, 2023