Overcoming multi-model forgetting in one-shot NAS with diversity maximization

One-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) significantly improves the computational efficiency through weight sharing. However, this approach also introduces multi-model forgetting during the supernet training (architecture search phase), where the performance of previous architectures degrades when sequentially training new architectures with partially-shared weights. To overcome such catastrophic forgetting, the state-of-the-art method assumes that the shared weights are optimal when jointly optimizing a posterior probability. However, this strict assumption is not necessarily held for One-Shot NAS in practice. In this paper, we formulate the supernet training in the One-Shot NAS as a constrained optimization problem of continual learning that the learning of current architecture should not degrade the performance of previous architectures. We propose a Novelty Search based Architecture Selection (NSAS) loss function and demonstrate that the posterior probability could be calculated without the strict assumption when maximizing the diversity of the selected constraints. A greedy novelty search method is devised to find the most representative subset to regularize the supernet training. We apply our proposed approach to two One-Shot NAS baselines, random sampling NAS (RandomNAS) and gradient-based sampling NAS (GDAS). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enhances the predictive ability of the supernet in One-Shot NAS and achieves remarkable performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and PTB with efficiency.