ConvNets Match Vision Transformers at Scale
Samuel L. Smith Andrew Brock Leonard Berrada Soham De
Many researchers believe that ConvNets perform well on small or moderately
sized datasets, but are not competitive with Vision Transformers when given
access to datasets on the web-scale. We challenge this belief by evaluating a
performant ConvNet architecture pre-trained on JFT-4B, a large labelled dataset
of images often used for training foundation models. We consider pre-training
compute budgets between 0.4k and 110k TPU-v4 core compute hours, and train a
series of networks of increasing depth and width from the NFNet model family.
We observe a log-log scaling law between held out loss and compute budget.
After fine-tuning on ImageNet, NFNets match the reported performance of Vision
Transformers with comparable compute budgets. Our strongest fine-tuned model
achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 90.4%.