Title: Exploring the Limits of Large Scale Pre-training
Authors: Samira Abnar
Mostafa Dehghani
Behnam Neyshabur
Hanie Sedghi
Venue: ICLR 2022
Keywords: Scaling law
Pre-training
Transfer learning
Large Scale
Vision Transformer
Few Shot
Empirical Investigation

Abstract: Recent developments in large-scale machine learning suggest that by scaling up data, model size and training time properly, one might  observe that improvements in pre-training would transfer favorably to  most downstream tasks. In this work we systematically study this phenomena and establish that, as we increase the upstream accuracy, performance of downstream tasks \emph{saturates}. In particular, we investigate more than 4800 experiments on Vision Transformers, MLP-Mixers and ResNets with number of parameters ranging from ten million to ten billion, trained on the largest scale of available image data (JFT, ImageNet21K) and evaluated on more than 20 downstream image recognition tasks. We propose a model for downstream performance  that reflects the saturation phenomena and captures the nonlinear relationship in performance of upstream and downstream tasks. Delving deeper to understand the reasons that give rise to these phenomena, we show that the observed saturation behavior is closely related to the way that representations evolve through the layers of the models. We showcase an even more extreme scenario where performance on upstream and downstream are at odds with each other. That is, in order to have a better downstream performance, we need to hurt upstream accuracy.


Review discussion:
Strengths:
1). The relationship between (US, DS) accuracy is intuitively convincible especially in the high performance regions (Fig. 1), Appendix Table F.1, F.2 further shows that correlation values change drastically for different choices of (US, DS) tasks. Thanks author[s] for the extensive experiments.
2). The choice of hyperparameters is important for minimizing the discrepancy between US and DS performances. Appendix C and D show an case study of US weight decay in the projection layer of ViT on the effect of downstream DS accuracy, showing that at the expense of hurting US accuracy could instead lead to the improvement of DS tasks. This is counter-intuitive but technically sounds especially for high performing regions.
3). The proposal for improving performance on the breadth of downstream task by adding upstream data diversity to (data size, model parameters, FLOPs) sounds plausible. It would be excellent if author[s] can give a concrete method on how to do it in future.
Weakness:
1). If there is any case study that showing US accuracy can accurately predict DS accuracy but (model size, US data size, compute) cannot? Compared to Figure 1, which conclusion cannot not be shown from Figure 4?
2). From the study of head weight decay can we conclude that improving the feature extraction performance of lower layers lead to better generalization performance in ViT (see Figure 6, Appendix F.22, F.23)?
3).
In practice it costs long time to get a single US accuracy, if there is any proxy/surrogate way to make a cheap estimation? From Figure 1 I can see the curve is saturated only towards the end, which means an early prediction of US accuracy is not a reliable predictor of DS accuracy.
In other words, how can we use power law prediction for model selection in practice (see Appendix Fig. F6, F7, F8, F9)?
NO.
Dear reviewer 3WYy,
Thank you so much for the insightful review and the interesting comments and questions.
Hereby, we respond to each of your concerns:
1. We don’t argue that model size, US data size, and compute can not predict DS accuracy, we argue that all these scaling variables contribute toward predicting DS accuracy, but that most of their impact is captured by the US accuracy (Figure F.18). That means, taking upstream accuracy into account, we do not need to look at these three dimensions separately. This is very useful, since modelling the scaling behaviour with respect to these three aspects, separately, is very difficult due to their complex interaction with each other and the optimal hyperparameters for each configuration.
Figure 1, shows the big picture that, as the US accuracy increases, DS accuracy starts to saturate on many DS tasks. Where we can achieve a better US accuracy by tuning hyper-parameters or scaling up model size, data size and/or compute. Figure 4, shows the effect of each of these scaling variables in a controlled setup (it’s a grid search of all combinations of model size, datasets and training epochs). If we add enough points to Figure 4, e.g., by including more variations of hyper-parameters, we should be able to exactly replicate Figure 1.
2. Thanks for sharing this interesting insight in the review. It sounds very intuitive that generally the feature extraction mechanism can impact the generalization behaviour of the model. What is suggested as a potential conclusion from the weight decay experiment could be the case.
However, this statement requires defining the type of generalization we refer to, and running more experiments and ablation studies.  What our analyses mainly indicate is that depending on the relation between the two tasks (upstream and downstream), learned features at different levels of abstraction would be transferable to the downstream task.
3. The main goal of our paper is to provide an analysis to understand the limits of scaling up. In our analysis, we estimate the best possible achievable accuracy on a given downstream task, with respect to the upstream accuracy. It’s not about estimating the downstream performance of a specific model, rather the general scaling dynamics. As an alternative approach, as we see in Figure 6, tracking the transfer performance of the representation obtained from different layers of the model, might help in predicting the scaling dynamics.
We would be happy to discuss if there are any additional concerns or questions.
Strengths:
- the high-level question that the paper asks makes sense, and becomes more important as models and datasets grow larger and larger, so that fewer organisations have the resources to handle them
- the sheer size of the study makes it interesting, I would think that many of us are doubting whether some of our findings and beliefs from data- and compute-limited studies hold also for truly huge datasets and models beyond our resources
- it is a clevert idea to analyse model performance in terms of a convex envelope, so as to better approximate the upper performance bound for a given model size and "factor out" architecture and hyper-parameter choices, and at least at first glance it makes a lot of sense
Weaknesses:
- concerns remain whether the "hyper-modern" types of models that are the focus of the paper are representative, I would argue that the majority of computer vision users still employ "old-fashioned" convolutional architectures rather than vision transformers or MLP-mixers,
especially in data- or compute-constrained scenarios
-the narrow focus on low-shot scenarios and on image-level classification is somehow inconsistent with the "real-world, large-scale" aspirations of the paper; let's face it, at the application level outside the research lab, where transfer learning and dataset constraints really matter, one-label-per-image retrieval-type settings are the exception. The effect of large-scale pre-training  for more structured tasks like
semantic segmentation, detection, etc. would be a lot more relevant
- the paper is overly dense  and overloaded. I am fine with an arbitrarily large and detailed appendix, but the paper itself tries to squeeze too many things into 9 pages. Graphs are so small they are hardly readable; explanatory text is somewhat hard to follow and parse, despite the not overly complicated message; countless references to the appendix make it practically impossible to read the main paper without the appendix; etc.
NO.
Dear Reviewer 2EkD,
Thank you for your review and for sharing your valuable feedback with us.
We certainly agree with the reviewer that one of the important aspects about this paper is the large scale meta-study.
However, we would like to highlight a few of other contributions of the paper that are beyond an exhaustive study of large-scale pre-training:
- We suggest, and provide intuitive, theoretical and empirical justification that when studying scaling behaviour, one should take the convex hull of points into account, instead of all data points or their average.
- We show that the few-shot transfer performance of the models across their layers, correlates with the scaling relation between upstream and downstream tasks.
- We investigate the role of hyperparameters of pre-trained models and showcase scenarios where performances of different downstream tasks, or performances of upstream and downstream tasks are at odds with each other. We also elaborate on the reason behind this phenomenon.
Here we respond to the issues you have raised:
- Concerns about studied model architecture: We’d like to restate that in our meta study we include variants of ViT and MLP-Mixers, as well as  best performing ResNet models.
In fact, one of our contributions here, is to study the scaling behaviour, by looking into the accuracies on upstream and downstream tasks, irrespective of other hyper-parameters, including model architecture. The idea is to understand how much we can gain by training a perfect model on a given upstream task. This means the focus is on models that achieve best performance on the downstream task, for a fixed upstream accuracy. And we believe our study includes those.
Moreover, there is evidence indicating that choice of architecture does not impact the power law governing the DS performance (see [2,3,4,5] for example).
- Concerns about practicality of few shot settings: In our analysis we investigate few-shot transfer performance of the models where the number of shots is 1,5, 10, and 20. We observe similar trends for different numbers of shots.
Moreover, we have included fine-tuning experiments as proof of concept, to show that our conclusions generalize to this setup as well.
While in many cases, the few shot performance of the models is relatively a good indicator of fine-tuning performance [1], few-shot settings, itself,  is one of the most commonly used setups in practical scenarios.
- Tasks byond classification: We agree that extending these analyses beyond image classification is an important next step.
However, in this paper we focus on image classification to ensure the training objective is similar for upstream and downstream and that there are no side effects due to task discrepancy. We are very eager to expand our study and are planning to go not only beyond classification, but also beyond vision and explore more diverse setups. These however require dedicated studies. The main challenge for this goal is collecting enough experiments both in terms of quantity and diversity.
### References:
1. Djolonga, Josip, et al. "On robustness and transferability of convolutional neural networks." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2021.
2. Kaplan, Jared, et al. "Scaling laws for neural language models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.08361 (2020).
3. Shankar, Vaishaal, et al. "Do Image Classifiers Generalize Across Time?." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision. 2021.
4. Shankar, Vaishaal, et al. "Evaluating machine accuracy on imagenet." International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2020.
5. Taori, Rohan, et al. "Measuring robustness to natural distribution shifts in image classification." arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.00644 (2020).
Strengths:
1. The paper is well-written and easy to follow.
2. Extensive experiments and analysis have been conducted, which makes it a strong technical report.
3.
Besides the saturating behavior, some insights drawn from the observations are good to be heard in the community, such as increasing the data density of upstream tasks, predicting downstream performance for a given upstream accuracy, and etc.
Weaknesses:
1. This paper is just focusing on the task of image recognition. It will be more beneficial to consider complicated visual tasks and other modalities and to investigate whether the same conclusion still holds.
2.
In terms of predicting downstream performance for a given upstream accuracy, can the authors compare the proposed method with those model selection techniques such as LogME [1]? Which technique is more practical for the real-world transfer tasks to select the best pre-trained model?
[1] You, Kaichao, et al. "Logme: Practical assessment of pre-trained models for transfer learning." International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2021.
NO.
Dear reviewer SKn8,
Thank you for your comments. We appreciate that you find the paper well written and some of the conclusions beneficial for the community.
We definitely agree with the reviewer that it is, indeed, important to run such analyses for different types of tasks and modalities.  One concern that we take into account while designing our experiments is to avoid side effects from uncontrolled factors. An example of this is when upstream and downstream tasks are different. E.g., classification (recognition) vs object detection(localization). In scenarios like this, task discrepancy could make the learned knowledge from pre-training in general less transferable to the downstream tasks [1].  The phenomena that is under study in our paper is by itself complex.
Hence, in this work, we decided to focus on a setup where the task/objective is similar in upstream and downstream, which is image recognition.
Moreover, many of the analyses we ran are based on the results from experiments that were already done by researchers.
At least currently, we don’t have access to such a large number of experiments for other pre-training tasks than image recognition to be able to deliver robust conclusions.
It is both interesting, and a curious case, to study the scaling behaviour of the models in various setups including when we have different objectives and tasks in upstream and downstream, but it’s only fair if we postpone these analyses to future work.
About comparison with the recent work by You et al 2021, per request of the reviewer, we have added a paragraph to the related work section, to compare what we do in this paper with methods for estimating transferability of pre-trained models, including LogMe.
Here is what we have added to the “additional related work” section of the paper (Appendix A)
>In the context of transfer learning, generally, model selection is a major step. Given a set of pre-trained models,  and a downstream task, we need techniques or methods to help us predict the performance of the pre-trained models on the downstream task. There have been several efforts in this direction, including NCE[3], LEAPS[4],  and most recently LogME[2]. The main focus of the aforementioned methods is to estimate the transfer performance of the models efficiently without actually having to fine-tune them on the given downstream task.
In this paper, on the other hand, our aim is not to predict the transfer performance of a specific model. We are taking the big picture into account, and focusing on understanding the limits of scaling up, i.e., the dynamics of the scaling behaviour of DS performance with respect to US accuracy.  The framework we propose and employ in this paper, can in general be used to answer the question of “How beneficial it would be for the downstream task if we improve the performance of the models on the upstream task by scaling up data, compute, model-size?”.
We show that having enough data points with a wide enough range of accuracies on the upstream task, one can fit a power-law curve that can be used to predict the best possible accuracy on the DS task with respect to any given us accuracy. Ideally, this would mean that we can predict the performance of models that do not yet exist. (We are predicting the best performance one could achieve on a DS task by pretraining on a given US  task).
Here we use few-shot accuracy as an indicator of the performance of the models on the downstream tasks. Methods such as LogME can be beneficial for such analysis, e.g., instead of tracking the few-shot performance of the models, one could look into other transferability metrics.
Finally, we sincerely hope that we have addressed all your concerns in the rebuttal. We would be happy to discuss if there are any further points. Considering that you find the technical and empirical novelty of our paper significant, and all the statements to be correct and well supported, we appreciate it a lot if you can update your overall assessment score of the paper if there are no additional issues.
### References
1. Zoph, Barret, et al. "Rethinking pre-training and self-training." 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020).
2. You, Kaichao, et al. "LogME: Practical assessment of pre-trained models for transfer learning." International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2021.
3. Tran, A. T., Nguyen, C. V., and Hassner, T. "Transferability and hardness of supervised classification tasks." In ICCV, 2019
4. Nguyen, C., Hassner, T., Seeger, M., and Archambeau, C. "LEEP: A New Measure to Evaluate Transferability of Learned Representations." In ICML, 2020.
### Key Strengths
1. This problem is very important, and these anlyses targeted to assess a key part of that problem.
2. The scale of these experiments is impressive, and their findings robustly motivated by said scale. It is hard to argue with the observed saturation effect in the context of how extensively you've profiled it.
Similarly, the results you've found are I think impactful. You've clearly established that we _cannot_ use upstream accuracy as proxy for _downstream accuracy_, and quantified some other insights as well relating to task consistency. These should be impactful in future research, though some revisions could amplify that effect.
3. I think that this is a meta-analysis makes the work much stronger--one of my biggest concern at first skim of the paper was precisely that your models wouldn't be trained in a manner consistent with other models published during ordinary research, and thus that your results would be less generalizable. By largely relying on pre-published models and results, you totally alleviate that concern and strengthen your findings.
4.
While I think you could do more here, I really like the representational analysis as well. Showing the consistency between saturation speed and layer preference both establishes some intuitive precedent for your findings and helps hint at some strategies we could take in the future to improve these results as well.
### Key Weaknesses
1. Your biggest issue here is presentation. This presents itself in two ways.
Firstly, you are _constantly_ referring to the appendix. If those appendix plots are so essential to your work, you need to find a way to incorporate them into the main body, or look for a different venue without page limitations (e.g., JMLR).
Secondly, the flow of this paper somewhat hinders my ability to get to your key takeaways quickly. I like your introduction -- I think it does a good job of setting up the problem and framing what you're going to do, but I feel like you lose that framing as soon as you branch into other sections. I sort of find myself reading the paper by skipping from figure to figure and trying to back out what take-aways the figures represent from the text, when what you want is to guide the reader through your work with your text directly.
To address this, I'd recommend reformulating the work slightly to have a more clear-cut structure, and generously sprinkle forwards and backwards pointers throughout your text and contextulaization sections to keep the reader constantly aware of where they are in your analysis and how that contributes to the big picture. You may also need to relegate some of your findings out of the main text, to secondary publications, or drop them entirely if you really want to crystallize your main take-aways for your readers.
2. Your work already speaks to the fact that for some tasks you can establish a strong power law fit even without using the full dense dataset you use in your experiments.
However, in order for this take-away to be proactively useful in general, it would also be valuable to determine to what extent you can fit a power-law saturation curve to a new model with only a limited computational budget for pre-trained models -- e.g., how few runs and over how few UA data-points can you accurately assess the power-law fit? Additional analyses on these fronts (or clear callouts/explanations to your current findings on these fronts) would be very valuable.
### Minor Weaknesses
1. I think you probably spend too much time on the randomized classifier section. I don't think those points are central to your paper, and I think this content could therefore be largely relegated to an appendix.
2. I think using accuracy is standard in the field, but I'd be further interested in other metrics like AUROC for these analyses too.
3. You should re-label your legend entry in Figure 1 for the asymptotic (@ UA = 1) performance value. I didn't find it clear from the legend entry alone and your caption for that figure is already very long.
### Other comments
1. I think it'd be really impactful if you replicated this analysis on NLP models.
NO.
Dear Reviewer pqjL,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments and the substantive review. We appreciate that you find this paper impactful and rigorous.
We also thank you for sharing your concerns about the presentation of the paper. We agree that the paper is a bit too dense. We have put a lot of thought into organizing the content of the paper, so that all the necessary information and pointers are included and clearly explained. We will make sure to work on this further for the camera ready version  to have a more concise thread of take home messages in all sections. If you have any additional concrete suggestions about how we can improve the readability of the paper, we appreciate it and will try to incorporate that in the paper.
As you mentioned, in section 2 (Figure 3), we show that if we fit the power-law equation to the convex hull of the points (versus actual data points, or their average), we can estimate the scaling behaviour (downstream accuracy with respect to upstream accuracy) more accurately.
While adding more data points improves the prediction accuracy (accuracy of predicting downstream performance given the upstream performance), with as few data points of 500 we can achieve a relatively low prediction error.
The main point here is that the data points should cover a wide range of US accuracies, otherwise, only taking a small range of US accuracies and their corresponding DS accuracies into account could lead to miscapturing the scaling behaviour to be linear.
On the other hand, If the question is:  “How much scaling up to get a better performance on the upstream task can contribute toward achieving a better performance on the downstream task?”, our analysis, in Figure 6, indicates that the performance of the downstream task on subnetworks of the model (i.e., when moving head to lower layers of the model), can be a good qualitative indicator.
So, given a new pair of DS and US tasks,  in the minimal case, even one model could show the scaling relationship between the two tasks.
We would like to emphasize that one of the contributions of our paper is proposing the use of the convex hull of the data points when studying the scaling behaviour.
While our focus is on the relation between upstream and downstream accuracy, this technique should generally be applied in most cases where scaling laws are being investigated to reduce the effect of noise and remove the dependency on density of the points in the plots.  The discussion about randomized classifiers is to justify why we can rely on the convex-hull of the points to get a more accurate fit for the scaling function. The point is that we are taking into account the performance of models that don’t exist in our dataset, and the argument of the randomized classifier provides  a proof that there definitely exists a model with such accuracies.
We agree that it is interesting to study the scaling laws considering a variety of metrics, as the performance of the model with respect to different metrics is not always correlated.
But considering the fact that the paper is already too dense, as rightfully mentioned by the reviewer, we believe it can be considered sufficient for now to report the results based on the commonly used metric, accuracy, and postpone further analysis with a wider range of performance indicators to future work.
Finally, we couldn’t agree more with you on the point that it would be both very interesting and beneficial to study the same phenomena for NLP tasks.
In fact, we already mentioned this  as an important next step in future work.
However, there are two main challenges for this future direction: (1) Gathering data for empirical study of this scale is not so trivial, and at least for now we don’t have access to such data for NLP models (we would need models all trained on the same upstream task). (2) Moving to language modality, we will face new challenges.
For instance,  the fact that the most common setup is to use self-supervised pre-training for upstream  (e.g., language modeling objective) and supervised fine tuning on various tasks. Discrepancy between the US/DS objectives would introduce a new factor that requires special treatment when running analyses.
We also updated the legend of Figure 1, hopefully it is a bit more clear now.

Meta-review:
role: PC
data: comment: This paper provides a very large-scale study on the pretraining of image recognition models. Specifically, three scaling factors (model sizes, dataset sizes, and training time) are extensively investigated. One important phenomenon observed by this paper is that stronger upstream accuracy may not necessarily contribute to stronger performance on downstream tasks---actually sometimes these two types of performance could even be at odds with each other

Overall, all the reviewers enjoy reading this paper and highly appreciate the empirical results presented in this paper. There were only a few concerns raised by the reviewers but most were well addressed during the discussion period. All reviewers reach a consensus on accepting this paper and believe this study is worthy to be heard by the community.

Decision: Accept (Spotlight)