We explore efficient neural architecture search methods and show that a
simple yet powerful evolutionary algorithm can discover new architectures with
excellent performance. Our approach combines a novel hierarchical genetic
representation scheme that imitates the modularized design pattern commonly
adopted by human experts, and an expressive search space that supports complex
topologies. Our algorithm efficiently discovers architectures that outperform a
large number of manually designed models for image classification, obtaining
top-1 error of 3.6% on CIFAR-10 and 20.3% when transferred to ImageNet, which
is competitive with the best existing neural architecture search approaches. We
also present results using random search, achieving 0.3% less top-1 accuracy on
CIFAR-10 and 0.1% less on ImageNet whilst reducing the search time from 36
hours down to 1 hour.

本文介绍了一种基于层次遗传表征和复杂拓扑的新颖神经体系结构搜索方法，该方法能够高效地发现优于许多手动设计模型的分类器，同时该方法通过随机搜索得到了更高的准确度并将搜索时间缩短至 1 小时。