Balanced Neural Architecture Search and Its Application in Specific Emitter Identification

The performance of a single neural network can vary unexpectedly corresponding to different classification tasks, and thus the network with fixed structure may lack flexibility and often lead to overfitting or underfitting. It is urgent, also the main objective of this paper, to deal with the limitation of the fixed neural network structure on classifying radar signals in different electromagnetic environments. We in this paper propose a variable network architecture search (NAS) mechanism, called balanced-NAS framework, and apply it in specific emitter identification (SEI) to greatly improve the flexibility of model searching. In the proposed balanced-NAS framework, a “block-cell” structure and a controller based recurrent neural network (RNN) are utilized to design models automatically according to external environment. In particular, a balance function is also proposed and utilized in the balanced-NAS framework, acting on the RNN controller to take both the validation accuracy and computational budget into consideration while searching for ideal models. The efficiency of the searching process is further enhanced by exploiting a progressive strategy to design simple and complicate child models where unpromising ones after each evaluation process are obsoleted to release searching space. Simulations and experiments indicate that the proposed balanced-NAS framework is extremely efficient and outperforms the conventional algorithms in classifying radar signals in different environments.