Two-Stage Architectural Fine-Tuning with Neural Architecture Search using Early-Stopping in Image Classification

Deep neural networks (NN) perform well in various tasks (e.g., computer vision) because of the convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, the difficulty of gathering quality data in the industry field hinders the practical use of NN. To cope with this issue, the concept of transfer learning (TL) has emerged, which leverages the fine-tuning of NNs trained on large-scale datasets in data-scarce situations. Therefore, this paper suggests a two-stage architectural fine-tuning method for image classification, inspired by the concept of neural architecture search (NAS). One of the main ideas of our proposed method is a mutation with base architectures, which reduces the search cost by using given architectural information. Moreover, an early-stopping is also considered which directly reduces NAS costs. Experimental results verify that our proposed method reduces computational and searching costs by up to 28.2% and 22.3%, compared to existing methods.