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Growing a Brain: Fine-Tuning by Increasing Model Capacity (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Jul 21, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of retraining a fixed-size network on new images, this approach adds extra units to make it bigger, then normalizes the new ones so they learn at the same speed as the old. It beat standard fine-tuning on several vision benchmarks.

Abstract

CNNs have made an undeniable impact on computer vision through the ability to learn high-capacity models with large annotated training sets. One of their remarkable properties is the ability to transfer knowledge from a large source dataset to a (typically smaller) target dataset. This is usually accomplished through fine-tuning a fixed-size network on new target data. Indeed, virtually every contemporary visual recognition system makes use of fine-tuning to transfer knowledge from ImageNet. In this work, we analyze what components and parameters change during fine-tuning, and discover that increasing model capacity allows for more natural model adaptation through fine-tuning. By making an analogy to developmental learning, we demonstrate that "growing" a CNN with additional units, either by widening existing layers or deepening the overall network, significantly outperforms classic fine-tuning approaches. But in order to properly grow a network, we show that newly-added units must be appropriately normalized to allow for a pace of learning that is consistent with existing units. We empirically validate our approach on several benchmark datasets, producing state-of-the-art results.

Yu-Xiong Wang, Deva Ramanan, Martial Hebert
arXiv:1907.07844 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Jul 18, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · CVPR

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