The effort devoted to hand-crafting image classifiers has motivated the use of architecture search to discover them automatically. Reinforcement learning and evolution have both shown promise for this purpose. This study introduces a regularized version of a popular asynchronous evolutionary algorithm. We rigorously compare it to the non-regularized form and to a highly-successful reinforcement learning baseline. Using the same hardware, compute effort and neural network training code, we conduct repeated experiments side-by-side, exploring different datasets, search spaces and scales. We show regularized evolution consistently produces models with similar or higher accuracy, across a variety of contexts without need for re-tuning parameters. In addition, regularized evolution exhibits considerably better performance than reinforcement learning at early search stages, suggesting it may be the better choice when fewer compute resources are available. This constitutes the first controlled comparison of the two search algorithms in this context. Finally, we present new architectures discovered with regularized evolution that we nickname AmoebaNets. These models set a new state of the art for CIFAR-10 (mean test error = 2.13%) and mobile-size ImageNet (top-5 accuracy = 92.1% with 5.06M parameters), and reach the current state of the art for ImageNet (top-5 accuracy = 96.2%).

这篇文章介绍了使用进化算法自动生成图像分类器的技术，并提出了一种改进的锦标赛选择进化算法，在同样的计算资源下超过了人类手工设计的图像分类器，并在 ImageNet 数据集上取得了优异成果。

图像分类器结构搜索的正则化进化