Automated search for configurations of convolutional neural network architectures

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are intensively used to solve a wide variety of complex problems. Although powerful, such systems require manual configuration and tuning. To this end, we view CNNs as configurable systems and propose an end-to-end framework that allows the configuration, evaluation and automated search for CNN architectures. Therefore, our contribution is threefold. First, we model the variability of CNN architectures with a Feature Model (FM) that generalizes over existing architectures. Each valid configuration of the FM corresponds to a valid CNN model that can be built and trained. Second, we implement, on top of Tensorflow, an automated procedure to deploy, train and evaluate the performance of a configured model. Third, we propose a method to search for configurations and demonstrate that it leads to good CNN models. We evaluate our method by applying it on image classification tasks (MNIST, CIFAR-10) and show that, with limited amount of computation and training, our method can identify high-performing architectures (with high accuracy). We also demonstrate that we outperform existing state-of-the-art architectures handcrafted by ML researchers. Our FM and framework have been released to support replication and future research.