PBIL for optimizing inception module in convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Inception module is one of the most used variants in convolutional neural networks. It has a large portfolio of success cases in computer vision. In the past years, diverse inception flavours, differing in the number of branches, the size and the number of the kernels, have appeared in the scientific literature. They are proposed based on the expertise of the practitioners without any optimization process. In this work, an implementation of population-based incremental learning is proposed for automatic optimization of the hyperparameters of the inception module. This hyperparameters optimization undertakes classification of the MNIST database of handwritten digit images. This problem is widely used as a benchmark in classification, and therefore, the learned best configurations for the Inception module will be of wide use in the deep learning community. In order to reduce the carbon footprint of the optimization process, policies for reducing the redundant evaluations have been undertaken. As a consequence of this work, an evaluation of configurations of the inception module and a mechanism for optimizing hyperparameters in deep learning architectures are stated.