Data-efficient Transfer Learning with Pre-trained Networks

Abstract: Deep learning has dominated the computer vision field since 2012, but a common criticism of deep learning methods is their dependence on large amounts of data. To combat this criticism research into data-efficient deep learning is growing. The foremost success in data-efficient deep learning is transfer learning with networks pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. Pre-trained networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many tasks. We consider the pre-trained network method for a new task where we have to collect the data. We hypothesize that the data efficiency of pre-trained networks can be improved through informed data collection. After exhaustive experiments on CaffeNet and VGG16, we conclude that the data efficiency indeed can be improved. Furthermore, we investigate an alternative approach to data-efficient learning, namely adding domain knowledge in the form of a spatial transformer to the pre-trained networks. We find that spatial transformers are difficult to train and seem to not improve data efficiency.