CSNAS: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning Neural Architecture Search Via Sequential Model-Based Optimization

This article proposes a novel contrastive self-supervised neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm, which completely alleviates the expensive costs of data labeling inherited from supervised learning. Our algorithm capitalizes on the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for image representations, which is an increasingly crucial topic of computer vision. First, using only a small amount of unlabeled train data under contrastive self-supervised learning allows us to search on a more extensive search space, discovering better neural architectures without surging the computational resources. Second, we entirely relieve the cost for labeled data (by contrastive loss) in the search stage without compromising architectures’ final performance in the evaluation phase. Finally, we tackle the inherent discrete search space of the NAS problem by sequential model-based optimization via the tree-parzen estimator, enabling us to significantly reduce the computational expense response surface. An extensive number of experiments empirically show that our search algorithm can achieve state-of-the-art results with better efficiency in data labeling cost, searching time, and accuracy in final validation.