English

Regularized Evolutionary Algorithm for Dynamic Neural Topology Search

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2020-12-21 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Designing neural networks for object recognition requires considerable architecture engineering. As a remedy, neuro-evolutionary network architecture search, which automatically searches for optimal network architectures using evolutionary algorithms, has recently become very popular. Although very effective, evolutionary algorithms rely heavily on having a large population of individuals (i.e., network architectures) and is therefore memory expensive. In this work, we propose a Regularized Evolutionary Algorithm with low memory footprint to evolve a dynamic image classifier. In details, we introduce novel custom operators that regularize the evolutionary process of a micro-population of 10 individuals. We conduct experiments on three different digits datasets (MNIST, USPS, SVHN) and show that our evolutionary method obtains competitive results with the current state-of-the-art.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.06252,
  title  = {Regularized Evolutionary Algorithm for Dynamic Neural Topology Search},
  author = {Cristiano Saltori and Subhankar Roy and Nicu Sebe and Giovanni Iacca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.06252},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:07:34.942Z