Discretization-aware architecture search

•We propose discretization-aware architecture search (DA2S), and target at pushing the super-network towards the configuration of desired topol- ogy. DA2S is implemented with an entropy-based loss term, which can be regularized to differentiable architecture search in a plug-and-play fashion.•The regularization for architecture search is controlled by elaborated continuation functions, so that discretization is adaptive to the dynamic change of edges and operations.•Experiments on standard image classification benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, in particular, under imbalanced network configurations that were not studied before.