Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track
Yiren Zhao, Xitong Gao, I Shumailov, Nicolo Fusi, Robert Mullins
Network Architecture Search (NAS) methods have recently gathered much attention. They design networks with better performance and use a much shorter search time compared to traditional manual tuning. Despite their efficiency in model deployments, most NAS algorithms target a single task on a fixed hardware system. However, real-life few-shot learning environments often cover a great number of tasks ($T$) and deployments on a wide variety of hardware platforms ($H$). The combinatorial search complexity $T \times H$ creates a fundamental search efficiency challenge if one naively applies existing NAS methods to these scenarios. To overcome this issue, we show, for the first time, how to rapidly adapt model architectures to new tasks in a \emph{many-task many-hardware} few-shot learning setup by integrating Model Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML) into the NAS flow. The proposed NAS method (H-Meta-NAS) is hardware-aware and performs optimisation in the MAML framework. MetaNAS shows a Pareto dominance compared to a variety of NAS and manual baselines in popular few-shot learning benchmarks with various hardware platforms and constraints. In particular, on the 5-way 1-shot Mini-ImageNet classification task, the proposed method outperforms the best manual baseline by a large margin ($5.21\%$ in accuracy) using $60\%$ less computation.