A Novel Fuzzy Neural Network Architecture Search Framework for Defect Recognition With Uncertainties

Defect recognition is an important task in intelligent manufacturing. Due to the subjectivity of human annotation, the collected defect data usually contains a lot of noise and unpredictable uncertainties, which have a great negative influence on defect recognition. It is a significant challenge to discover an effective defect recognition model with satisfactory uncertainty processing ability. A natural way is to automatically search for an efficient deep model, which can be realized by neural architecture search (NAS). To achieve this, we propose an efficient fuzzy NAS framework for defect recognition, where the searched architecture can effectively handle uncertain information from the given datasets. Specifically, we first design a fuzzy search space and the related encoding strategy for fuzzy NAS. Then, we propose a comparator-based evolutionary search approach, where an online end-to-end comparator is learned to directly determine the selection of candidate architectures from the evolutionary population. The comparator works in an end-to-end way and it transforms the complex ranking problem of evaluating architectures into a simple classification task, which overcomes the rank disorder issue suffered from traditional performance predictors. A series of experimental results demonstrate that the architecture with fewer #Params (1.22 M) search by fuzzy neural architecture search framework for defect recognition method achieves higher accuracy (92.26%) compared to the state-of-the-art results (i.e., DARTS-PV) on the ELPV dataset, as well as competitive results (accuracy = 76.4%, #Params = 1.04 M) on the CODEBRIM dataset. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method in handling uncertain problems.