Embedding channel pruning within the CNN architecture design using a bi-level evolutionary approach.

Remarkable advancements have been achieved in machine learning and computer vision through the utilization of deep neural networks. Among the most advantageous of these networks is the convolutional neural network (CNN). It has been used in pattern recognition, medical diagnosis, and signal processing, among other things. Actually, for these networks, the challenge of choosing hyperparameters is of utmost importance. The reason behind this is that as the number of layers rises, the search space grows exponentially. In addition, all known classical and evolutionary pruning algorithms require a trained or built architecture as input. During the design phase, none of them consider the process of pruning. In order to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of any architecture created, pruning of channels must be carried out before transmitting the dataset and computing classification errors. For instance, following pruning, an architecture of medium quality in terms of classification may transform into an architecture that is both highly light and accurate, and vice versa. There exist countless potential scenarios that could occur, which prompted us to develop a bi-level optimization approach for the entire process. The upper level involves generating the architecture while the lower level optimizes channel pruning. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have proven effective in bi-level optimization, leading us to adopt the co-evolutionary migration-based algorithm as a search engine for our bi-level architectural optimization problem in this research. Our proposed method, CNN-D-P (bi-level CNN design and pruning), was tested on the widely used image classification benchmark datasets, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Our suggested technique is validated by means of a set of comparison tests with regard to relevant state-of-the-art architectures.

Topology optimization search of deep convolution neural networks for CT and X-ray image classification.

Covid-19 is a disease that can lead to pneumonia, respiratory syndrome, septic shock, multiple organ failure, and death. This pandemic is viewed as a critical component of the fight against an enormous threat to the human population. Deep convolutional neural networks have recently proved their ability to perform well in classification and dimension reduction tasks. Selecting hyper-parameters is critical for these networks. This is because the search space expands exponentially in size as the number of layers increases. All existing approaches utilize a pre-trained or designed architecture as an input. None of them takes design and pruning into account throughout the process. In fact, there exists a convolutional topology for any architecture, and each block of a CNN corresponds to an optimization problem with a large search space. However, there are no guidelines for designing a specific architecture for a specific purpose; thus, such design is highly subjective and heavily reliant on data scientists' knowledge and expertise. Motivated by this observation, we propose a topology optimization method for designing a convolutional neural network capable of classifying radiography images and detecting probable chest anomalies and infections, including COVID-19. Our method has been validated in a number of comparative studies against relevant state-of-the-art architectures.