Abstract :
[en] Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) 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 DNNs as configurable systems and propose an end-to-end framework
that allows the configuration, evaluation and automated search for DNN architectures. Therefore, our contribution is threefold. First,
we model the variability of DNN architectures with a Feature Model (FM) that generalizes over existing architectures. Each valid
configuration of the FM corresponds to a valid DNN 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 DNN 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.
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