Genetic CNN

The deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is the state-of-the-art solution for large-scale visual recognition. Following some basic principles such as increasing network depth and constructing highway connections, researchers have manually designed a lot of fixed network architectures and verified their effectiveness. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of learning deep network structures automatically. Note that the number of possible network structures increases exponentially with the number of layers in the network, which motivates us to adopt the genetic algorithm to efficiently explore this large search space. The core idea is to propose an encoding method to represent each network structure in a…