Learn Basic Skills and Reuse: Modularized Adaptive Neural Architecture Search (MANAS)

Human intelligence is able to first learn some basic skills for solving basic problems and then assemble such basic skills into complex skills for solving complex or new problems. For example, the basic skills ``dig hole,'' ``put tree,'' ``backfill'' and ``watering'' compose a complex skill ``plant a tree''. Besides, some basic skills can be reused for solving other problems. For example, the basic skill ``dig hole'' not only can be used for planting a tree, but also can be used for mining treasures, building a drain, or landfilling. The ability to learn basic skills and reuse them for various tasks is very important for humans because it helps to avoid learning too many skills for solving each individual task, and makes it possible to solve a compositional number of tasks by learning just a few number of basic skills, which saves a considerable amount of memory and computation in the human brain. We believe that machine intelligence should also capture the ability of learning basic skills and reusing them by composing into complex skills. In computer science language, each basic skill is a ``module'', which is a reusable network of a concrete meaning and performs a specific basic operation. The modules are assembled into a bigger ``model'' for doing a more complex task. The assembling procedure is adaptive to the input or task, i.e., for a given task, the modules should be assembled into the most suitable model for solving the task. As a result, different inputs or tasks could have different assembled models, which enables self-assembling AI. In this work, we propose Modularized Adaptive Neural Architecture Search (MANAS) to demonstrate the above idea. Experiments on different datasets show that the adaptive architecture assembled by MANAS outperforms static global architectures. Further experiments and empirical analysis provide insights to the effectiveness of MANAS.