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Shenyang Huang

PhD - McGill University
Supervisor
Co-supervisor

Publications

RandomNet: Towards Fully Automatic Neural Architecture Design for Multimodal Learning
Stefano Alletto
Shenyang Huang
Vincent Francois-Lavet
Yohei Nakata
Almost all neural architecture search methods are evaluated in terms of performance (i.e. test accuracy) of the model structures that it fin… (see more)ds. Should it be the only metric for a good autoML approach? To examine aspects beyond performance, we propose a set of criteria aimed at evaluating the core of autoML problem: the amount of human intervention required to deploy these methods into real world scenarios. Based on our proposed evaluation checklist, we study the effectiveness of a random search strategy for fully automated multimodal neural architecture search. Compared to traditional methods that rely on manually crafted feature extractors, our method selects each modality from a large search space with minimal human supervision. We show that our proposed random search strategy performs close to the state of the art on the AV-MNIST dataset while meeting the desirable characteristics for a fully automated design process.
Neural Architecture Search for Class-incremental Learning
Shenyang Huang
Vincent Francois-Lavet
In class-incremental learning, a model learns continuously from a sequential data stream in which new classes occur. Existing methods often … (see more)rely on static architectures that are manually crafted. These methods can be prone to capacity saturation because a neural network's ability to generalize to new concepts is limited by its fixed capacity. To understand how to expand a continual learner, we focus on the neural architecture design problem in the context of class-incremental learning: at each time step, the learner must optimize its performance on all classes observed so far by selecting the most competitive neural architecture. To tackle this problem, we propose Continual Neural Architecture Search (CNAS): an autoML approach that takes advantage of the sequential nature of class-incremental learning to efficiently and adaptively identify strong architectures in a continual learning setting. We employ a task network to perform the classification task and a reinforcement learning agent as the meta-controller for architecture search. In addition, we apply network transformations to transfer weights from previous learning step and to reduce the size of the architecture search space, thus saving a large amount of computational resources. We evaluate CNAS on the CIFAR-100 dataset under varied incremental learning scenarios with limited computational power (1 GPU). Experimental results demonstrate that CNAS outperforms architectures that are optimized for the entire dataset. In addition, CNAS is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than naively using existing autoML methods.