In plain words: Small training tweaks like better data augmentation and optimization tricks are usually buried in code, so this study tests each one on its own. Together they raise ResNet-50's ImageNet accuracy by about 4 points, and the gains carry over to object detection and segmentation.
Abstract
Much of the recent progress made in image classification research can be credited to training procedure refinements, such as changes in data augmentations and optimization methods. In the literature, however, most refinements are either briefly mentioned as implementation details or only visible in source code. In this paper, we will examine a collection of such refinements and empirically evaluate their impact on the final model accuracy through ablation study. We will show that, by combining these refinements together, we are able to improve various CNN models significantly. For example, we raise ResNet-50's top-1 validation accuracy from 75.3% to 79.29% on ImageNet. We will also demonstrate that improvement on image classification accuracy leads to better transfer learning performance in other application domains such as object detection and semantic segmentation.
Tong He, Zhi Zhang, Hang Zhang, Zhongyue Zhang, Junyuan Xie, Mu Li
arXiv:1812.01187 · cs.CV · submitted Dec 4, 2018 · updated Dec 5, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures