Title
ConvNets vs. Transformers: Whose Visual Representations are More Transferable?
Abstract
Vision transformers have attracted much attention from computer vision researchers as they are not restricted to the spatial inductive bias of ConvNets. However; although Transformer-based backbones have achieved much progress on ImageNet classification, it is still unclear whether the learned representations are as transferable as or even more transferable than ConvNets' features. To address this point, we systematically investigate the transfer learning ability of ConvNets and vision transformers in 15 single-task and multi-task performance evaluations. We observe consistent advantages of Transformer-based backbones on 13 downstream tasks (out of 15), including but not limited to line-grained classification, scene recognition (classification, segmentation and depth estimation), open-domain classification, face recognition, etc. More specifically, we find that two ViT models heavily rely on whole network fine-tuning to achieve performance gains while Swin Transformer does not have such a requirement. Moreover, vision transformers behave more robustly in multi-task learning, i.e., bringing more improvements when managing mutually beneficial tasks and reducing performance losses when tackling irrelevant tasks. We hope our discoveries can facilitate the exploration and exploitation of vision transformers in the future.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICCVW54120.2021.00252
2021 IEEE/CVF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION WORKSHOPS (ICCVW 2021)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
n/a
Conference
2021
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2473-9936
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
1
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hong-Yu Zhou192.19
Chixiang Lu201.01
Sibei Yang300.68
Yizhou Yu42907181.26