Autonomous Deep Learning: A Genetic DCNN Designer for Image Classification

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the breakthrough success of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) in image classification and other vision applications. Although freeing users from the troublesome handcrafted feature extraction by providing a uniform feature extraction-classification framework, DCNNs still require a handcrafted design of their architectures. In this paper, we propose the genetic DCNN designer, an autonomous learning algorithm can generate a DCNN architecture automatically based on the data available for a specific image classification problem. We first partition a DCNN into multiple stacked meta convolutional blocks and fully connected blocks, each containing the operations of convolution, pooling, fully connection, batch normalization, activation and drop out, and thus convert the architecture into an integer vector. Then, we use refined evolutionary operations, including selection, mutation and crossover to evolve a population of DCNN architectures. Our results on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, EMNISTDigit, EMNIST-Letter, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets suggest that the proposed genetic DCNN designer is able to produce automatically DCNN architectures, whose performance is comparable to, if not better than, that of stateof- the-art DCNN models