Despite its high search efficiency, differential architecture search (DARTS) often selects network architectures with dominated skip connections which lead to performance degradation. However, theoretical understandings on this issue remain absent, hindering the development of more advanced methods in a principled way. In this work, we solve this problem by theoretically analyzing the effects of various types of operations, e.g. convolution, skip connection and zero operation, to the network optimization. We prove that the architectures with more skip connections can converge faster than the other candidates, and thus are selected by DARTS. This result, for the first time, theoretically and explicitly reveals the impact of skip connections to fast network optimization and its competitive advantage over other types of operations in DARTS. Then we propose a theory-inspired path-regularized DARTS that consists of two key modules: (i) a differential group-structured sparse binary gate introduced for each operation to avoid unfair competition among operations, and (ii) a path-depth-wise regularization used to incite search exploration for deep architectures that often converge slower than shallow ones as shown in our theory and are not well explored during search. Experimental results on image classification tasks validate its advantages. Codes and models will be released.

Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would significantly restrict the quality of the approximating distributions. In this paper, we propose a new type of VBPI, VBPI-NF, as a first step to empower phylogenetic posterior estimation with deep learning techniques. By handling the non-Euclidean branch length space of phylogenetic models with carefully designed permutation equivariant transformations, VBPI-NF uses normalizing flows to provide a rich family of flexible branch length distributions that generalize across different tree topologies. We show that VBPI-NF significantly improves upon the vanilla VBPI on a benchmark of challenging real data Bayesian phylogenetic inference problems. Further investigation also reveals that the structured parameterization in those permutation equivariant transformations can provide additional amortization benefit.

Most compilers for machine learning (ML) frameworks need to solve many correlated optimization problems to generate efficient machine code. Current ML compilers rely on heuristics based algorithms to solve these optimization problems one at a time. However, this approach is not only hard to maintain but often leads to sub-optimal solutions especially for newer model architectures. Existing learning based approaches in the literature are sample inefficient, tackle a single optimization problem, and do not generalize to unseen graphs making them infeasible to be deployed in practice. To address these limitations, we propose an end-to-end, transferable deep reinforcement learning method for computational graph optimization (GO), based on a scalable sequential attention mechanism over an inductive graph neural network. GO generates decisions on the entire graph rather than on each individual node autoregressively, drastically speeding up the search compared to prior methods. Moreover, we propose recurrent attention layers to jointly optimize dependent graph optimization tasks and demonstrate 33%-60% speedup on three graph optimization tasks compared to TensorFlow default optimization. On a diverse set of representative graphs consisting of up to 80,000 nodes, including Inception-v3, Transformer-XL, and WaveNet, GO achieves on average 21% improvement over human experts and 18% improvement over the prior state of the art with 15x faster convergence, on a device placement task evaluated in real systems.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has been extensively studied in the past few years. A popular approach is to represent each neural architecture in the search space as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and then search over all DAGs by encoding the adjacency matrix and list of operations as a set of hyperparameters. Recent work has demonstrated that even small changes to the way each architecture is encoded can have a significant effect on the performance of NAS algorithms.

In this work, we present the first formal study on the effect of architecture encodings for NAS, including a theoretical grounding and an empirical study. First we formally define architecture encodings and give a theoretical characterization on the scalability of the encodings we study. Then we identify the main encoding-dependent subroutines which NAS algorithms employ, running experiments to show which encodings work best with each subroutine for many popular algorithms. The experiments act as an ablation study for prior work, disentangling the algorithmic and encoding-based contributions, as well as a guideline for future work. Our results demonstrate that NAS encodings are an important design decision which can have a significant impact on overall performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/naszilla/naszilla.

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding is well-known in learning representations of KGs. Many models have been proposed to learn the interactions between entities and relations of the triplets. However, long-term information among multiple triplets is also important to KG. In this work, based on the relational paths, which are composed of a sequence of triplets, we define the Interstellar as a recurrent neural architecture search problem for the short-term and long-term information along the paths. First, we analyze the difficulty of using a unified model to work as the Interstellar. Then, we propose to search for recurrent architecture as the Interstellar for different KG tasks. A case study on synthetic data illustrates the importance of the defined search problem. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the searched models and the efficiency of the proposed hybrid-search algorithm.

Normalization layers and activation functions are fundamental components in deep networks and typically co-locate with each other. Here we propose to design them using an automated approach. Instead of designing them separately, we unify them into a single tensor-to-tensor computation graph, and evolve its structure starting from basic mathematical functions. Examples of such mathematical functions are addition, multiplication and statistical moments. The use of low-level mathematical functions, in contrast to the use of high-level modules in mainstream NAS, leads to a highly sparse and large search space which can be challenging for search methods. To address the challenge, we develop efficient rejection protocols to quickly filter out candidate layers that do not work well. We also use multi-objective evolution to optimize each layer's performance across many architectures to prevent overfitting. Our method leads to the discovery of EvoNorms, a set of new normalization-activation layers with novel, and sometimes surprising structures that go beyond existing design patterns. For example, some EvoNorms do not assume that normalization and activation functions must be applied sequentially, nor need to center the feature maps, nor require explicit activation functions. Our experiments show that EvoNorms work well on image classification models including ResNets, MobileNets and EfficientNets but also transfer well to Mask R-CNN with FPN/SpineNet for instance segmentation and to BigGAN for image synthesis, outperforming BatchNorm and GroupNorm based layers in many cases.

We present the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB), a diverse set of challenging and realistic benchmark datasets to facilitate scalable, robust, and reproducible graph machine learning (ML) research. OGB datasets are large-scale, encompass multiple important graph ML tasks, and cover a diverse range of domains, ranging from social and information networks to biological networks, molecular graphs, source code ASTs, and knowledge graphs. For each dataset, we provide a unified evaluation protocol using meaningful application-specific data splits and evaluation metrics. In addition to building the datasets, we also perform extensive benchmark experiments for each dataset. Our experiments suggest that OGB datasets present significant challenges of scalability to large-scale graphs and out-of-distribution generalization under realistic data splits, indicating fruitful opportunities for future research. Finally, OGB provides an automated end-to-end graph ML pipeline that simplifies and standardizes the process of graph data loading, experimental setup, and model evaluation. OGB will be regularly updated and welcomes inputs from the community. OGB datasets as well as data loaders, evaluation scripts, baseline code, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://ogb.stanford.edu .

Deep learning (DL) frameworks take advantage of GPUs to improve the speed of DL inference and training. Ideally, DL frameworks should be able to fully utilize the computation power of GPUs such that the running time depends on the amount of computation assigned to GPUs. Yet, we observe that in scheduling GPU tasks, existing DL frameworks suffer from inefficiencies such as large scheduling overhead and unnecessary serial execution. To this end, we propose Nimble, a DL execution engine that runs GPU tasks in parallel with minimal scheduling overhead. Nimble introduces a novel technique called ahead-of-time (AoT) scheduling. Here, the scheduling procedure finishes before executing the GPU kernel, thereby removing most of the scheduling overhead during run time. Furthermore, Nimble automatically parallelizes the execution of GPU tasks by exploiting multiple GPU streams in a single GPU. Evaluation on a variety of neural networks shows that compared to PyTorch, Nimble speeds up inference and training by up to 22.34× and 3.61×, respectively. Moreover, Nimble outperforms state-of-the-art inference systems, TensorRT and TVM, by up to 2.81× and 1.70×, respectively.

Machine learning on tiny IoT devices based on microcontroller units (MCU) is appealing but challenging: the memory of microcontrollers is 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller even than mobile phones. We propose MCUNet, a framework that jointly designs the efficient neural architecture (TinyNAS) and the lightweight inference engine (TinyEngine), enabling ImageNet-scale inference on microcontrollers. TinyNAS adopts a two-stage neural architecture search approach that first optimizes the search space to fit the resource constraints, then specializes the network architecture in the optimized search space. TinyNAS can automatically handle diverse constraints (i.e. device, latency, energy, memory) under low search costs. TinyNAS is co-designed with TinyEngine, a memory-efficient inference library to expand the search space and fit a larger model. TinyEngine adapts the memory scheduling according to the overall network topology rather than layer-wise optimization, reducing the memory usage by 3.4×, and accelerating the inference by 1.7-3.3× compared to TF-Lite Micro [3] and CMSIS-NN [28]. MCUNet is the first to achieves >70% ImageNet top1 accuracy on an off-the-shelf commercial microcontroller, using 3.5× less SRAM and 5.7× less Flash compared to quantized MobileNetV2 and ResNet-18. On visual&audio wake words tasks, MCUNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and runs 2.4-3.4× faster than Mo- bileNetV2 and ProxylessNAS-based solutions with 3.7-4.1× smaller peak SRAM. Our study suggests that the era of always-on tiny machine learning on IoT devices has arrived.

Although there is a vast body of literature related to methods for detecting change-points (CPs), less attention has been paid to assessing the statistical reliability of the detected CPs. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to perform statistical inference on the significance of the CPs, estimated by a Dynamic Programming (DP)-based optimal CP detection algorithm. Our main idea is to employ a Selective Inference (SI) approach---a new statistical inference framework that has recently received a lot of attention---to compute exact (non-asymptotic) valid p-values for the detected optimal CPs. Although it is well-known that SI has low statistical power because of over-conditioning, we address this drawback by introducing a novel method called parametric DP, which enables SI to be conducted with the minimum amount of conditioning, leading to high statistical power. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, through which we offer evidence that our proposed method is more powerful than existing methods, has decent performance in terms of computational efficiency, and provides good results in many practical applications.