Task Adaptation of Reinforcement Learning-based NAS Agents through Transfer Learning

Abstract: Recently, a novel paradigm has been proposed for reinforcement learning-based NAS agents, that revolves around the incremental improvement of a given architecture. We assess the abilities of such reinforcement learning agents to transfer between different tasks. We perform our evaluation using the Trans-NASBench-101 benchmark, and consider the efficacy of the transferred agents, as well as how quickly they can be trained. We find that pretraining an agent on one task benefits the performance of the agent in another task in all but 1 task when considering final performance. We also show that the training procedure for an agent can be shortened significantly by pretraining it on another task. Our results indicate that these effects occur regardless of the source or target task, although they are more pronounced for some tasks than for others. Our results show that transfer learning can be an effective tool in mitigating the computational cost of the initial training procedure for reinforcement learning-based NAS agents.