Papers › Revisiting ResNets: Improved Training and Scaling Strategies

Revisiting ResNets: Improved Training and Scaling Strategies

13 Mar 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2103.07579archive 2025-07-28

Irwan Bello, William Fedus, Xianzhi Du, Ekin D. Cubuk, Aravind Srinivas, Tsung-Yi Lin, Jonathon Shlens, Barret Zoph

Novel computer vision architectures monopolize the spotlight, but the impact of the model architecture is often conflated with simultaneous changes to training methodology and scaling strategies. Our work revisits the canonical ResNet (He et al., 2015) and studies these three aspects in an effort to disentangle them. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that training and scaling strategies may matter more than architectural changes, and further, that the resulting ResNets match recent state-of-the-art models. We show that the best performing scaling strategy depends on the training regime and offer two new scaling strategies: (1) scale model depth in regimes where overfitting can occur (width scaling is preferable otherwise); (2) increase image resolution more slowly than previously recommended (Tan & Le, 2019). Using improved training and scaling strategies, we design a family of ResNet architectures, ResNet-RS, which are 1.7x - 2.7x faster than EfficientNets on TPUs, while achieving similar accuracies on ImageNet. In a large-scale semi-supervised learning setup, ResNet-RS achieves 86.2% top-1 ImageNet accuracy, while being 4.7x faster than EfficientNet NoisyStudent. The training techniques improve transfer performance on a suite of downstream tasks (rivaling state-of-the-art self-supervised algorithms) and extend to video classification on Kinetics-400. We recommend practitioners use these simple revised ResNets as baselines for future research.

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Code

tensorflow/tpu officialtf report
nachiket273/pytorch_resnet_rs mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
rwightman/pytorch-image-models mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Action ClassificationDocument Image ClassificationImage ClassificationSemantic Object Interaction ClassificationVideo Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Document Image Classification AIP ResNet-RS (ResNet-200 + RS training tricks) Top 1 Accuracy - Verb 83.4 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ResNet-RS-50 (160 image res) GFLOPs 4.6 #322 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ResNet-RS-50 (160 image res) Number of params 192M #322 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ResNet-RS-50 (160 image res) Top 1 Accuracy 84.4% #322 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ResNet-RS-270 (256 image res) GFLOPs 54 #384 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet ResNet-RS-270 (256 image res) Top 1 Accuracy 83.8% #384 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification PRImA ResNet-152 2x (RS training) Percentage correct 89.3 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Introduced by this paper: ResNet-RS

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationBottleneck Residual BlockConvolutionCosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDepthwise ConvolutionDepthwise Separable ConvolutionDropoutEfficientNetGlobal Average PoolingInverted Residual BlockKaiming InitializationLabel SmoothingMax PoolingPointwise ConvolutionRMSPropReLUResNet-DResNet-RSResidual BlockResidual ConnectionSigmoid ActivationSqueeze-and-Excitation BlockStochastic DepthWeight DecayXavier Initialization

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