Cited by 1,325Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsAdvanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques

Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?

Open access
Kornblith, Simon, Shlens, Jonathon, Le, Quoc V.·2019·2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

Transfer learning is a cornerstone of computer vision, yet little work has been done to evaluate the relationship between architecture and transfer. An implicit hypothesis in modern computer vision research is that models that perform better on ImageNet necessarily perform better on other vision tasks. However, this hypothesis has never been systematically tested. Here, we compare the performance of 16 classification networks on 12 image classification datasets. We find that, when networks are used as fixed feature extractors or fine-tuned, there is a strong correlation between ImageNet accuracy and transfer accuracy (r = 0.99 and 0.96, respectively). In the former setting, we find that this relationship is very sensitive to the way in which networks are trained on ImageNet; many common forms of regularization slightly improve ImageNet accuracy but yield features that are much worse for transfer learning. Additionally, we find that, on two small fine-grained image classification datasets, pretraining on ImageNet provides minimal benefits, indicating the learned features from ImageNet do not transfer well to fine-grained tasks. Together, our results show that ImageNet architectures generalize well across datasets, but ImageNet features are less general than previously suggested.

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Crossref · 10.1109/cvpr.2019.00277

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  • Training neural networks with the fine-tune strategy can gain much better results than with random initialization.

    “Training neural networks with the fine-tune strategy can gain much better results than with random initialization.”
  • Transferring knowledge from a large scale source dataset to a small one has proved to be a meaningful practice.

    “Transferring the knowledge from a large scale source dataset to a small one has proved to be a meaningful practice.”

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Authors
Kornblith, S., Shlens, J., & Le, Q. V.
Affiliations
Google (United States) (US)
Venue
2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2019-06
Pages
2656-2666
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2804935296
Cited by
1,325
References
87
Citations by year
2026: 106 · 2025: 154 · 2024: 186 · 2023: 170 · 2022: 198 · 2021: 233 · 2020: 167 · 2019: 92 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 1
FWCI
66.00
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques
Keywords
transfer learning, ImageNet, feature extraction, fine-tuning, regularization, pre-training, fine-grained image classification, cross-dataset generalization

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