NeurIPS 2020

Evolving Normalization-Activation Layers


Meta Review

The paper focuses on designing new neural architectures ; it presents a new search space and new optimization criteria. The new search space includes tensor-to-tensor operators integrating activation and normalization functions ; the criteria involve an early performance indicator (this is classical) and a stability indicator (this is new). The rebuttal addressed nearly all reviewers' concern: * about the significance of the performance gains; * about the generality of the approach when applied to other architectures; * about the fair evaluation (with a hold-out); * about the impact of the stability indicator (lesion study). Congratulations for the work ! The AC would like the computational cost of the evolution to be spelled out in the revised paper (beyond "a relatively large number of CPUs" ..); how many tournaments ? As a suggestion, it might be interesting to see whether (and how) scale insensitivity (E.2) could be used as a 3rd rejection criterion.