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The Untapped Potential of Off-the-Shelf Convolutional Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
2 points by Katydid on Mar 24, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of keeping a network's shape fixed, this lets four layers change how they handle images at test time as scales vary. That tweak gives an off-the-shelf image classifier over 95% accuracy on a photo test set, beating models with over 20 times more parameters.

Abstract

Over recent years, a myriad of novel convolutional network architectures have been developed to advance state-of-the-art performance on challenging recognition tasks. As computational resources improve, a great deal of effort has been placed in efficiently scaling up existing designs and generating new architectures with Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms. While network topology has proven to be a critical factor for model performance, we show that significant gains are being left on the table by keeping topology static at inference-time. Due to challenges such as scale variation, we should not expect static models configured to perform well across a training dataset to be optimally configured to handle all test data. In this work, we seek to expose the exciting potential of inference-time-dynamic models. By allowing just four layers to dynamically change configuration at inference-time, we show that existing off-the-shelf models like ResNet-50 are capable of over 95% accuracy on ImageNet. This level of performance currently exceeds that of models with over 20x more parameters and significantly more complex training procedures.

Matthew Inkawhich, Nathan Inkawhich, Eric Davis, Hai Li, Yiran Chen
arXiv:2103.09891 · cs.CV, cs.AI · submitted Mar 17, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · 12 pages, 8 figures

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