Automatic methods for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) have been shown to produce state-of-the-art network models, yet, their main drawback is the computational complexity of the search process. As some primal methods optimized over a discrete search space, thousands of days of GPU were required for convergence. A recent approach is based on constructing a differentiable search space that enables gradient-based optimization, thus reducing the search time to a few days. While successful, such methods still include some incontinuous steps, e.g., the pruning of many weak connections at once. In this paper, we propose a differentiable search space that allows the annealing of architecture weights, while gradually pruning inferior operations, thus the search converges to a single output network in a continuous manner. Experiments on several vision datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to the search cost, accuracy and the memory footprint of the achieved model.

该论文提出了一种不同iable的搜索空间方法，可以通过逐渐修剪较差的操作，实现体系结构权重的退火，从而以连续的方式收敛到单个输出网络，实验表明该方法在视觉数据集上具有较高的准确性和较低的搜索成本。

ASAP:体系结构搜索，降温和裁剪