Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation

Chenxi Liu, Liang-Chieh Chen, Florian Schroff, Hartwig Adam, Wei Hua, Alan L. Yuille, Li Fei-Fei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 82-92

Abstract


Recently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has successfully identified neural network architectures that exceed human designed ones on large-scale image classification. In this paper, we study NAS for semantic image segmentation. Existing works often focus on searching the repeatable cell structure, while hand-designing the outer network structure that controls the spatial resolution changes. This choice simplifies the search space, but becomes increasingly problematic for dense image prediction which exhibits a lot more network level architectural variations. Therefore, we propose to search the network level structure in addition to the cell level structure, which forms a hierarchical architecture search space. We present a network level search space that includes many popular designs, and develop a formulation that allows efficient gradient-based architecture search (3 P100 GPU days on Cityscapes images). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the challenging Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC 2012, and ADE20K datasets. Auto-DeepLab, our architecture searched specifically for semantic image segmentation, attains state-of-the-art performance without any ImageNet pretraining.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Liu_2019_CVPR,
author = {Liu, Chenxi and Chen, Liang-Chieh and Schroff, Florian and Adam, Hartwig and Hua, Wei and Yuille, Alan L. and Fei-Fei, Li},
title = {Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2019}
}