Efficient Automatic Machine Learning via Design Graphs

Despite the success of automated machine learning (AutoML), which aims to find the best design, including the architecture of deep networks and hyper-parameters, conventional AutoML methods are computationally expensive and hardly provide insights into the effect of various model design choices. To tackle the challenges, we propose FALCON, an efficient sample-based method to predict the performance of a model and search for the optimal model design. Our key insight is to model the design space of possible model designs as a design graph, where the nodes represent design choices, and the edges denote design similarities. FALCON features 1) a task-agnostic module, which performs message passing on the design graph via a Graph Neural Network (GNN), and 2) a task-specific module, which conducts label propagation of the known model performance information on the design graph. Both modules are combined to predict the performances of each design in the design space. We conduct extensive experiments on 27 tasks on graphs, including node and graph classifications in various application domains, and an image classification task on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We empirically show that FALCON can efficiently obtain the well-performing designs for each task using only 30 explored nodes. Specifically, FALCON has a comparable time cost with the one-shot approaches while achieving an average improvement of 3.3% on the graph classification datasets.