Directions in ML: “Neural architecture search: Coming of age”

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a very promising but still young field. I will start this talk by discussing various works aiming to build a scientific community around NAS, including benchmarks, best practices, and open source frameworks. Then, I will discuss several exciting directions for the field: (1) a broad range of possible speedup techniques for NAS; (2) joint NAS + hyperparameter optimization in Auto-PyTorch to allow off-the-shelf AutoML; and (3) the extended problem definition of neural ensemble search (NES) that searches for a set of complementary architectures rather than a single one as in NAS.

Slides for this talk are available: https://www.automl.org/talks (opens in new tab)

Speaker Details

Frank Hutter (opens in new tab) is a Full Professor for Machine Learning at the Computer Science Department of the University of Freiburg (Germany), as well as Chief Expert AutoML at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (opens in new tab). Frank holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia (2009) and a MSc from TU Darmstadt (2004). He received the 2010 CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best thesis in AI in Canada, and with his coauthors, several best paper awards and prizes in international competitions on machine learning, SAT solving, and AI planning. He is the recipient of a 2013 Emmy Noether Fellowship, a 2016 ERC Starting Grant, a 2018 Google Faculty Research Award, and a 2020 ERC PoC Award (opens in new tab). He is also a Fellow of ELLIS (opens in new tab) and Program Chair at ECML 2020.

In the field of AutoML, Frank co-founded the ICML workshop series on AutoML (opens in new tab) in 2014 and has co-organized it every year since, co-authored the prominent AutoML tools Auto-WEKA (opens in new tab) and Auto-sklearn (opens in new tab), won the first two AutoML challenges with his team, co-authored the first book on AutoML, worked extensively on efficient hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search, and gave a NeurIPS 2018 tutorial with over 3000 attendees.

Date:
Speakers:
Frank Hutter
Affiliation:
University of Freiburg