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README.md

Dynamic Ensemble of Low-fidelity Experts：Mitigating NAS Cold-Start

There are several python files and cfgs dir under this directory. The python files are:

  • datasets.py: Codes for dataset construction
  • utils.py: Utils for predictor training and validation
  • train_predictor.py: Directly train the predictor on the actual performance data, or pretrain the predictor on a single type of low-fidelity information data and finetune on the actual performanda data
  • dynamic_ensemble_train_predictor.py: Conduct predictor training with the proposed dynamic ensemble framework
  • plugin/nds_arch_embedder.py: LSTM architecture encoder for NDS-ResNet / ResNeXT-A

Environmental Setup

First, you should install awnas. Then, to use the plugin codes, you can soft link the plugin to a position under the directory ${AWNAS_HOME}/plugins (If the environment variable AWNAS_HOME is not specified, it is by default ${HOME}/awnas/):

ln -s `readlink -f ./plugin` ${HOME}/awnas/plugins/dele

If you are using multiple versions of plugin codes, you can use an alternative directory as the AWNAS home directory for your experimental runs.

mkdir my_workspace
mkdir -p my_workspace/awnas/plugins
ln -s ${HOME}/awnas/data my_workspace/awnas # soft link the data dir
ln -s `readlink -f ./plugin` my_workspace/awnas/plugins/dele # soft link the plugin dir to make it active
export AWNAS_HOME=`readlink -f my_workspace/awnas` # a relative path to your later working path can also be used

After these soft linking and environment setting, awnas will load plugins from my_workspace/awnas/plugins instead of ${HOME}/awnas/plugins.

Data Preparation

Download the data from here.

Run Predictor Training

To run the proposed dynamic ensemble predictor training framework, use the dynamic_ensemble_train_predictor.py script. Specifically, run python dynamic_ensemble_train_predictor.py <CFG_FILE> --search-space <SEARCH_SPACE> --train-ratio <TRAIN_RATIO> --pretrain-ratio <PRETRAIN_RATIO> --train-pkl <TRAIN_PKL> --valid-pkl <VALID_pkl> --seed <SEED> --gpu <GPU_ID> --train-dir <TRAIN_DIR>, where:

  • CFG_FILE: Path of the configuration file
  • SEARCH_SPACE: The search space (including nasbench-201 / nb301 / nds)
  • TRAIN_RATIO: Proportion of training samples used in the second-step training
  • PRETRAIN_RATIO: Proportion of training sampled used in the first-step training. Default: 1.0
  • TRAIN_PKL: Path of the training data
  • VALID_PKL: Path of the validation data
  • SEED: Seed (optional)
  • GPU_ID: ID of the used GPU. Currently, we only support single-GPU training. Default: 0
  • TRAIN_DIR: Path to save the logs and results

To run the pretrain-and-finetune predictor training flow, use the train_predictor.py script. Specifically, run python train_predictor.py <CFG_FILE> --search-space <SEARCH_SPACE> --train-ratio <TRAIN_RATIO> --pretrain-ratio <PRETRAIN_RATIO> --train-pkl <TRAIN_PKL> --valid-pkl <VALID_pkl> --low-fidelity-type <LOW_FIDELITY_TYPE> --seed <SEED> --gpu <GPU_ID> --train-dir <TRAIN_DIR>, where:

  • LOW_FIDELITY_TYPE: Type of the utilized low-fidelity information. Default: one_shot

By set --no-pretrain, we can run the vanilla predictor training flow without utilizing low-fidelity information.

We provide example predictor training configuration files under ./cfgs, including:

  • train_nb201_gates_config.yaml:
    • Encoder: GATES
    • Search space: nasbench-201
    • Objective: Ranking loss
    • Method: Vanilla or the pretrain & finetune method as described in Introduction.
  • dynamic_ensemble_nb201_gates_config.yaml
    • Encoder: GATES
    • Search space: nasbench-201
    • Objective: Ranking loss (DELE only support ranking loss)
    • Method: Dynamic ensemble

For example, run dynamic ensemble predictor training on NAS-Bench-201 with 100% training samples by

python dynamic_ensemble_train_predictor.py cfgs/dynamic_ensemble_nb201_gates_config.yaml --search-space nasbench-201 --train-ratio 1.0 --train-pkl data/NAS-Bench-201/nasbench201_train.pkl --valid-pkl data/NAS-Bench-201/nasbench201_valid.pkl --train-dir <TRAIN_DIR>

Other example configuration files are uploaded here.

Run Architecture Search

We provide an example architecture search configuration file cfgs/nasbench-201_gates_search.yaml. The components include:

  • Encoder: GATES
  • Search space: nasbench-201
  • Objective: Ranking loss
  • Predictor Training Method: Dynamic ensemble
  • Inner Search Strategy: Evolutionary

Using this configurtion file includes two steps:

  • In the first step, conduct first-step training using dynamic_ensemble_train_predictor.py as described above. And set pretrained_predictor_path: <TRAIN_DIR>/pre_final.ckpt in cfgs/nasbench-201_gates_search.yaml.
  • In the second step, conduct the next search process with the following command: awnas search cfgs/nasbench-201_gates_search.yaml --seed <SEED> --gpu <GPU_ID> --train-dir <TRAIN_DIR>

Available Types of Low-fidelity Information

Available types of low-fidelity information for different search spaces include:

  • NAS-Bench-201: grad_norm, snip, grasp, fisher, jacob_cov, plain, synflow, flops, params, relu, relu_logdet, one_shot, latency
  • NAS-Bench-301: one_shot, grad_norm, snip, grasp, fisher, jacob_cov, plain, synflow, synflow_bn, flops, params
  • NDS-ResNet / ResNeXT-A: relu_logdet, grad_norm, grasp, jacob_cov, plain, relu, synflow, one_shot, params, flops