Efficient Transferability Assessment for Selection of Pre-trained
  Detectors
Zhao Wang Aoxue Li Zhenguo Li Qi Dou
Large-scale pre-training followed by downstream fine-tuning is an effective
solution for transferring deep-learning-based models. Since finetuning all
possible pre-trained models is computational costly, we aim to predict the
transferability performance of these pre-trained models in a computational
efficient manner. Different from previous work that seek out suitable models
for downstream classification and segmentation tasks, this paper studies the
efficient transferability assessment of pre-trained object detectors. To this
end, we build up a detector transferability benchmark which contains a large
and diverse zoo of pre-trained detectors with various architectures, source
datasets and training schemes. Given this zoo, we adopt 7 target datasets from
5 diverse domains as the downstream target tasks for evaluation. Further, we
propose to assess classification and regression sub-tasks simultaneously in a
unified framework. Additionally, we design a complementary metric for
evaluating tasks with varying objects. Experimental results demonstrate that
our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in assessing
transferability under different target domains while efficiently reducing
wall-clock time 32$\times$ and requires a mere 5.2\% memory footprint compared
to brute-force fine-tuning of all pre-trained detectors.