Rethinking Bi-Level Optimization in Neural Architecture Search: A Gibbs Sampling Perspective

One-Shot architecture search, aiming to explore all possible operations jointly based on a single model, has been an active direction of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). As a well- known one-shot solution, Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) performs continuous relaxation on the architecture’s importance and results in a bi-level optimization problem. As many recent studies have shown, DARTS cannot always work robustly for new tasks, which is mainly due to the approximate solution of the bi-level optimization. In this paper, one-shot neural architecture search is addressed by adopting a directed probabilistic graphical model to represent the joint probability distribution over data and model. Then, neural architectures are searched for and optimized by Gibbs sampling. We re- think the bi-level optimization problem as the task of Gibbs sampling from the posterior distribution, which expresses the preferences for different models given the observed dataset. We evaluate our proposed NAS method – GibbsNAS on the search space used in DARTS/ENAS as well as the search space of NAS-Bench-201. Experimental results on multiple search spaces show the efficacy and stability of our approach.