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Big Transfer (Bit): General Visual Representation Learning (arxiv.org)
4 points by jonbaer on May 23, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Train a big network on a huge labeled picture set, then fine-tune it on the target task with a simple rule. It beats the usual smaller-scale pre-training across over 20 datasets, from one example per class to a million, reaching 87.5% on ImageNet.

Abstract · Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning

Transfer of pre-trained representations improves sample efficiency and simplifies hyperparameter tuning when training deep neural networks for vision. We revisit the paradigm of pre-training on large supervised datasets and fine-tuning the model on a target task. We scale up pre-training, and propose a simple recipe that we call Big Transfer (BiT). By combining a few carefully selected components, and transferring using a simple heuristic, we achieve strong performance on over 20 datasets. BiT performs well across a surprisingly wide range of data regimes -- from 1 example per class to 1M total examples. BiT achieves 87.5% top-1 accuracy on ILSVRC-2012, 99.4% on CIFAR-10, and 76.3% on the 19 task Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB). On small datasets, BiT attains 76.8% on ILSVRC-2012 with 10 examples per class, and 97.0% on CIFAR-10 with 10 examples per class. We conduct detailed analysis of the main components that lead to high transfer performance.

Alexander Kolesnikov, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Joan Puigcerver, Jessica Yung, Sylvain Gelly, Neil Houlsby
arXiv:1912.11370 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Dec 24, 2019 · updated May 5, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · The first three authors contributed equally. Results on ObjectNet are reported in v3

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