abstract = "Deep Evolutionary Network Structured Representation
(DENSER) is a novel approach to automatically design
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) using Evolutionary
Computation. The algorithm not only searches for the
best network topology (e.g., number of layers, type of
layers), but also tunes hyper-parameters, such as,
learning parameters or data augmentation parameters.
The automatic design is achieved using a representation
with two distinct levels, where the outer level encodes
the general structure of the network, i.e., the
sequence of layers, and the inner level encodes the
parameters associated with each layer. The allowed
layers and range of the hyper-parameters values are
defined by means of a human-readable Context-Free
Grammar. DENSER was used to evolve ANNs for CIFAR-10,
obtaining an average test accuracy of 94.13percent. The
networks evolved for the CIFA--10 are tested on the
MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-100; the results are
highly competitive, and on the CIFAR-100 we report a
test accuracy of 78.75percent. our CIFAR-100 results
are the highest performing models generated by methods
that aim at the automatic design of Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNNs), and are amongst the best for
manually designed and fine-tuned CNNs.",