Learning Reliable Neural Networks with Distributed Architecture Representations

Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown the strong performance of learning neural models automatically in recent years. But most NAS systems are unreliable due to the architecture gap brought by discrete representations of atomic architectures. In this article, we improve the performance and robustness of NAS via narrowing the gap between architecture representations. More specifically, we apply a general contraction mapping to model neural networks with distributed representations (Neural Architecture Search with Distributed Architecture Representations (ArchDAR)). Moreover, for a better search result, we present a joint learning approach to integrating distributed representations with advanced architecture search methods. We implement our ArchDAR in a differentiable architecture search model and test learned architectures on the language modeling task. On the Penn Treebank data, it outperforms a strong baseline significantly by 1.8 perplexity scores. Also, the search process with distributed representations is more stable, which yields a faster structural convergence when it works with the differentiable architecture search model.