Robust architecture search using network adaptation

Experts have designed popular and successful model architectures, which, however, were not the optimal option for different scenarios. Despite the remarkable performances achieved by deep neural networks, manually designed networks for classification tasks are the backbone of object detection. One major challenge is the ImageNet pre-training of the search space representation; moreover, the searched network incurs huge computational cost. Therefore, to overcome the obstacle of the pre-training process, we introduce a network adaptation technique using a pre-trained backbone model tested on ImageNet. The adaptation method can efficiently adapt the manually designed network on ImageNet to the new object-detection task. Neural architecture search (NAS) is adopted to adapt the architecture of the network. The adaptation is conducted on the MobileNetV2 network. The proposed NAS is tested using SSDLite detector. The results demonstrate increased performance compared to existing network architecture in terms of search cost, total number of adder arithmetics (Madds), and mean Average Precision(mAP). The total computational cost of the proposed NAS is much less than that of the State Of The Art (SOTA) NAS method.