CAM-NAS: An Efficient and Interpretable Neural Architecture Search Model Based on Class Activation Mapping

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made rapid progress in recent years, but as the complexity of AI models and the need to deploy them on multiple platforms gradually increases, the design of network model structures for specific platforms becomes more difficult. A neural network architecture search (NAS) serves as a solution to help experts discover new network structures that are suitable for different tasks and platforms. However, traditional NAS algorithms often consume time and many computational resources, especially when dealing with complex tasks and large-scale models, and the search process can become exceptionally time-consuming and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we propose a class activation graph-based neural structure search method (CAM-NAS) to address these problems. Compared with traditional NAS algorithms, CAM-NAS does not require full training of submodels, which greatly improves the search efficiency. Meanwhile, CAM-NAS uses the class activation graph technique, which makes the searched models have better interpretability. In our experiments, we tested CAM-NAS on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 graphics card and showed that it can evaluate a submodel in only 0.08 seconds, which is much faster than traditional NAS methods. In this study, we experimentally evaluated CAM-NAS using the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets as benchmarks. The experimental results show that CAM-NAS achieves very good results. This not only proves the efficiency of CAM-NAS, but also demonstrates its powerful performance in image classification tasks.