Open source code for the paper: “ AutoML-Zero: Evolving Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch ”
5-Minute Demo: Discovering Linear Regression From Scratch
As a miniature “AutoML-Zero” experiment, let’s try to automatically discover programs to solve linear regression tasks.
To get started, first install bazel here (bazel>=2.2.0 and C >=25 are required), then run the demo with:
This script runs evolutionary search on linear tasks (T) (search) in the paper). After each experiment, it evaluates the best algorithm discovered on (new linear tasks) (T) (select) in the paper). Once an algorithm attains a fitness (1 – RMS error) greater than 0. , it is selected for a final evaluation on unseen tasks To conclude, the demo prints the results of the final evaluation and shows the code for the automatically discovered algorithm.
To make this demo quick, we use a much smaller search space than in the paper : only the math operations necessary to implement linear regression are allowed and the programs are constrained to a short, fixed length. Even with these limitations, the search space is quite sparse, as random search experiments show that only ~ 1 in 12 8) algorithms in the space can solve the tasks with the required accuracy. Nevertheless, this demo typically discovers programs similar to linear regression by gradient descent in under 5 minutes using 1 CPU (Note that the runtime may vary due to random seeds and hardware). We have seen similar and more interesting discoveries in the unconstrained search space (see more details in the paper ).
You can compare the automatically discovered algorithm with the solution from a human ML researcher (one of the authors):
(def Setup): s2=0. # Init learning rate. def Predict (): # v0=features s1=dot (v0, v1) # Apply weights def Learn (): # v0=features; s0=label s3=s0 – s1 # Compute error. s4=s3 s1 # Apply learning rate. v2=v0 s4 # Compute gradient. v1=v1 v2 # Update weights.
In this human designed program, the Setup function establishes a learning rate, the (Predict) function applies a set of weights to the inputs, and the (Learn) function corrects the weights in the opposite direction to the gradient; in other words, a linear regressor trained with gradient descent. The evolved programs may look different even if they have the same functionality due to redundant instructions and different ordering, which can make them challenging to interpret. See more details about how we address these problems in the .
Reproducing Search Baselines
First install bazel
(bazel>=2.2.0 and C >=are required), then run the following command to reproduce the results in Supplementary Section 9 ("Baselines") with the "Basic" method on 1 process (1 CPU):
[To be continued, ETA: March, 2020]
If you want to use more than 1 process, you will need to create your own implementation to parallelize the computation based on your particular distributed-computing platform. A platform-agnostic description of what we did is given in our paper.
We left out of this directory upgrades for the "Full" method that are pre-existing (hurdles) but included those presented in this paper (e.g. FEC for ML algorithms).
If you use the code in your research, please cite:
TODO
Search keywords: machine learning, neural networks, evolution, evolutionary algorithms, regularized evolution, program synthesis, architecture search, NAS, neural architecture search, neuro-architecture search, AutoML, AutoML-Zero, algorithm search, meta-learning, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, neuroevolution, neuro-evolution.
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