Enhancing Fitness Evaluation in Genetic Algorithm-Based Architecture Search for AI-Aided Financial Regulation

AI-aided financial regulation (AIFR) is a practical and significant task, but current solutions have yet to be optimized with customized model designs. Given the privacy concerns surrounding financial data, we aim to employ neural architecture search (NAS) to help nonexpert end-users automatically design architectures. The genetic algorithm (GA)-based NAS stands out due to its relatively low hardware requirements and robust theoretical foundation. However, constrained by limited data, the model would undergo architecture search on a general regulatory dataset while being deployed on private one owned by each organization. The data distribution of the private dataset may vary from that of public datasets, giving rise to the challenge of data domain shift. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel fitness evaluation method. When scoring the fitness, we take into account both the architecture’s validation accuracy and its potential for generalization by the metric of loss landscape. In addition, we improve the training paradigm for evaluation, utilizing a prototype-based training paradigm based on embedding distances for classification, allowing for rapid domain adaptation and improving performance on the distribution-shift data. We further introduce GA-TextCNN, a GA-based NAS framework specifically designed for text recognition, enhancing its suitability for text data within AIFR tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we collect two related datasets and evaluate our method on it. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves baseline models and is effective in solving the AIFR problem.