abstract = "Recently, there emerged revived interests of designing
automatic programs (e.g., using genetic/evolutionary
algorithms) to optimise the structure of Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNNs) for a specific task. The
challenge in designing such programs lies in how to
balance between large search space of the network
structures and high computational costs. Existing works
either impose strong restrictions on the search space
or use enormous computing resources. In this paper, we
study how to design a genetic programming approach for
optimising the structure of a CNN for a given task
under limited computational resources yet without
imposing strong restrictions on the search space. To
reduce the computational costs, we propose two general
strategies that are observed to be helpful: (i)
aggressively selecting strongest individuals for
survival and reproduction, and killing weaker
individuals at a very early age; (ii) increasing
mutation frequency to encourage diversity and faster
evolution. The combined strategy with additional
optimisation techniques allows us to explore a large
search space but with affordable computational costs.
Our results on standard benchmark datasets (MNIST,
SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) are competitive to similar
approaches with significantly reduced computational
costs.",