2020/03/26 by Chenxi Liu, Piotr Dollár, Liu, Chenxi +9 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning and Data Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.12056
openalex publication_date 2020/03/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Existing neural network architectures in computer vision -- whether designed by humans or by machines -- were typically found using both images and their associated labels. In this paper, we ask the question: can we find high-quality neural architectures using only images, but no human-annotated labels? To answer this question, we first define a new setup called Unsupervised Neural Architecture Search (UnNAS). We then conduct two sets of experiments. In sample-based experiments, we train a large number (500) of diverse architectures with either supervised or unsupervised objectives, and find that the architecture rankings produced with and without labels are highly correlated. In search-based experiments, we run a well-established NAS algorithm (DARTS) using various unsupervised objectives, and report that the architectures searched without labels can be competitive to their counterparts searched with labels. Together, these results reveal the potentially surprising finding that labels are not necessary, and the image statistics alone may be sufficient to identify good neural architectures.