Fixing the train-test resolution discrepancy

Data-augmentation is key to the training of neural networks for image classification. This paper first shows that existing augmentations induce a significant discrepancy between the typical size of the objects seen by the classifier at train and test time.

We experimentally validate that, for a target test resolution, using a lower train resolution offers better classification at test time. We then propose a simple yet effective and efficient strategy to optimize the classifier performance when the train and test resolutions differ.

It involves only a computationally cheap fine-tuning of the network at the test resolution. This enables training strong classifiers using small training images.

For instance, we obtain 77.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with a ResNet-50 trained on 128x128 images, and 79.8% with one trained on 224x224 image. In addition, if we use extra training data we get 82.5% with the ResNet-50 train with 224x224 images.

Conversely, when training a ResNeXt-101 32x48d pre-trained in weakly-supervised fashion on 940 million public images at resolution 224x224 and further optimizing for test resolution 320x320, we obtain a test top-1 accuracy of 86.4% (top-5: 98.0%) (single-crop). To the best of our knowledge this is the highest ImageNet single-crop, top-1 and top-5 accuracy to date.