Accelerating Neural Architecture Search for Natural Language Processing with Knowledge Distillation and Earth Mover's Distance

Recent AI research has witnessed increasing interests in automatically designing the architecture of deep neural networks, which is coined as neural architecture search (NAS). The automatically searched network architectures via NAS methods have outperformed manually designed architectures on some NLP tasks. However, training a large number of model configurations for efficient NAS is computationally expensive, creating a substantial barrier for applying NAS methods in real-life applications. In this paper, we propose to accelerate neural architecture search for natural language processing based on knowledge distillation (called KD-NAS). Specifically, instead of searching the optimal network architecture on the validation set conditioned on the optimal network weights on the training set, we learn the optimal network by minimizing the knowledge loss transferred from a pre-trained teacher network to the searching network based on Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). Experiments on five datasets show that our method achieves promising performance compared to strong competitors on both accuracy and searching speed. For reproducibility, we submit the code at: https://github.com/lxk00/KD-NAS-EMD.