Unveiling the Backbone-Optimizer Coupling Bias in Visual Representation Learning

Siyuan Li, Juanxi Tian, Zedong Wang, Luyuan Zhang, Zicheng Liu, Weiyang Jin, Yang Liu, Baigui Sun, Stan Z. Li

Unveiling the Backbone-Optimizer Coupling Bias in Visual Representation Learning: 35 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #8 of 49 papers on 2024-10-10. Day-by-day upvote history.

This paper delves into the interplay between vision backbones and optimizers, unvealing an inter-dependent phenomenon termed \textbf{backbone-optimizer coupling bias} (BOCB). We observe that canonical CNNs, such as VGG and ResNet, exhibit a marked co-dependency with SGD families, while recent architectures like ViTs and ConvNeXt share a tight coupling with the adaptive learning rate ones. We further show that BOCB can be introduced by both optimizers and certain backbone designs and may significantly impact the pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of vision models. Through in-depth empirical analysis, we summarize takeaways on recommended optimizers and insights into robust vision backbone architectures. We hope this work can inspire the community to question long-held assumptions on backbones and optimizers, stimulate further explorations, and thereby contribute to more robust vision systems. The source code and models are publicly available at https://bocb-ai.github.io/.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

Data: hysts-bot-data/daily-papers-stats and the Daily Papers API. Open data: tardellirs/paper-pulse-data. Sister project: Model Pulse, the download history of every model on the Hub.