Cheaper Pre-training Lunch: An Efficient Paradigm for Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a general and efficient pre-training paradigm, Montage pre-training, for object detection. Montage pre-training needs only the target detection dataset while taking only 1/4 computational resources compared to the widely adopted ImageNet pre-training.To build such an efficient paradigm, we reduce the potential redundancy by carefully extracting useful samples from the original images, assembling samples in a Montage manner as input, and using an ERF-adaptive dense classification strategy for model pre-training. These designs include not only a new input pattern to improve the spatial utilization but also a novel learning objective to expand the effective receptive field of the pretrained model. The efficiency and effectiveness of Montage pre-training are validated by extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset, where the results indicate that the models using Montage pre-training are able to achieve on-par or even better detection performances compared with the ImageNet pre-training.

EcoNAS: Finding Proxies for Economical Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieves significant progress in many computer vision tasks. While many methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency of NAS, the search progress is still laborious because training and evaluating plausible architectures over large search space is time-consuming. Assessing network candidates under a proxy (i.e., computationally reduced setting) thus becomes inevitable. In this paper, we observe that most existing proxies exhibit different behaviors in maintaining the rank consistency among network candidates. In particular, some proxies can be more reliable -- the rank of candidates does not differ much comparing their reduced setting performance and final performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate some widely adopted reduction factors and report our observations. Inspired by these observations, we present a reliable proxy and further formulate a hierarchical proxy strategy. The strategy spends more computations on candidate networks that are potentially more accurate, while discards unpromising ones in early stage with a fast proxy. This leads to an economical evolutionary-based NAS (EcoNAS), which achieves an impressive 400x search time reduction in comparison to the evolutionary-based state of the art (8 vs. 3150 GPU days). Some new proxies led by our observations can also be applied to accelerate other NAS methods while still able to discover good candidate networks with performance matching those found by previous proxy strategies.