Biography
Dr. Ran Cheng, the founder of the Evolving Machine Intelligence (EMI) Group, is currently a tenured Associate Professor with the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), China. He received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Surrey, UK, in 2016.
In the broad context of AI, he is particularly interested in studying how evolution generates complexity, diversity and intelligence via computing. Specifically, his research interests mainly fall into the interdisciplinary fields across evolutionary computation and other major AI fields such as representation learning and reinforcement learning, to provide high-performance computational solutions to optimization & modeling problems in modern science & engineering.
He is the Founding Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Shenzhen Chapter and IEEE Symposium on Model Based Evolutionary Algorithms (IEEE MBEA). He serves as an Associated Editor/Editorial Board Member for several journals, including: IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, etc. He is the recipient of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Awards (2018, 2021), the IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award (2019), the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Outstanding Paper Award (2020). He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
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- Computational Intelligence
- Evolutionary Computation
- Representation Learning
PhD, Computer Science, 2013 - 2016
University of Surrey, UK
Postgraduate, Computer Science and Technology, 2010 - 2012
Zhejiang University, China
BEng, Computer Science and Technology, 2006 - 2010
Northeastern University, China
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Featured Publications
The ongoing advancements in network architecture design have led to remarkable achievements in deep learning across various challenging computer vision tasks. Meanwhile, the development of neural architecture search (NAS) has provided promising approaches to automating the design of network architectures for lower prediction error. Recently, the emerging application scenarios of deep learning (e.g., autonomous driving) have raised higher demands for network architectures considering multiple design criteria: number of parameters/weights, number of floating-point operations, inference latency, among others. From an optimization point of view, the NAS tasks involving multiple design criteria are intrinsically multiobjective optimization problems; hence, it is reasonable to adopt evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) algorithms for tackling them. Nonetheless, there is still a clear gap confining the related research along this pathway: on the one hand, there is a lack of a general problem formulation of NAS tasks from an optimization point of view; on the other hand, there are challenges in conducting benchmark assessments of EMO algorithms on NAS tasks. To bridge the gap: (i) we formulate NAS tasks into general multi-objective optimization problems and analyze the complex characteristics from an optimization point of view; (ii) we present an end-to-end pipeline, dubbed EvoXBench, to generate benchmark test problems for EMO algorithms to run efficiently -without the requirement of GPUs or Pytorch/Tensorflow; (iii) we instantiate two test suites comprehensively covering two datasets, seven search spaces, and three hardware devices, involving up to eight objectives. Based on the above, we validate the proposed test suites using six representative EMO algorithms and provide some empirical analyses. The code of EvoXBench is available at https://github.com/EMI-Group/EvoXBench.
The architectural advancements in deep neural networks have led to remarkable leap-forwards across a broad array of computer vision tasks. Instead of relying on human expertise, neural architecture search (NAS) has emerged as a promising avenue towards automating the design of architectures. While recent achievements on image classification have suggested opportunities, the promises of NAS have yet to be thoroughly assessed on more challenging tasks of semantic segmentation. The main challenges of applying NAS to semantic segmentation arise from two aspects: i) high-resolution images to be processed; ii) additional requirement of real-time inference speed (i.e. real-time semantic segmentation) for applications such as autonomous driving. To meet such challenges, we propose a surrogate-assisted multi-objective method in this paper. Through a series of customized prediction models, our method effectively transforms the original NAS task to an ordinary multi-objective optimization problem. Followed by a hierarchical pre-screening criterion for in-fill selection, our method progressively achieves a set of efficient architectures trading-off between segmentation accuracy and inference speed. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets together with an application using Huawei Atlas 200 DK suggest that our method can identify architectures significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art architectures designed both manually by human experts and automatically by other NAS methods. Code is available from https://github.com/mikelzc1990/nas-semantic-segmentation.
Despite the remarkable successes of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision, it is time-consuming and error-prone to manually design a CNN. Among various neural architecture search (NAS) methods that are motivated to automate designs of high-performance CNNs, the differentiable NAS and population-based NAS are attracting increasing interests due to their unique characters. To benefit from the merits while overcoming the deficiencies of both, this work proposes a novel NAS method, RelativeNAS. As the key to efficient search, RelativeNAS performs joint learning between fast learners (i.e., decoded networks with relatively lower loss value) and slow learners in a pairwise manner. Moreover, since RelativeNAS only requires low-fidelity performance estimation to distinguish each pair of fast learner and slow learner, it saves certain computation costs for training the candidate architectures. The proposed RelativeNAS brings several unique advantages: 1) it achieves state-of-the-art performances on ImageNet with top-1 error rate of 24.88%, that is, outperforming DARTS and AmoebaNet-B by 1.82% and 1.12%, respectively; 2) it spends only 9 h with a single 1080Ti GPU to obtain the discovered cells, that is, 3.75x and 7875x faster than DARTS and AmoebaNet, respectively; and 3) it provides that the discovered cells obtained on CIFAR-10 can be directly transferred to object detection, semantic segmentation, and keypoint detection, yielding competitive results of 73.1% mAP on PASCAL VOC, 78.7% mIoU on Cityscapes, and 68.5% AP on MSCOCO, respectively. The implementation of RelativeNAS is available at https://github.com/EMI-Group/RelativeNAS.