Battle of the Backbones: A Large-Scale Comparison of Pretrained Models
  across Computer Vision Tasks
Authors: name: Micah Goldblum, name: Hossein Souri, name: Renkun Ni, name: Manli Shu, name: Viraj Prabhu, name: Gowthami Somepalli, name: Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, name: Mark Ibrahim, name: Adrien Bardes, name: Judy Hoffman, name: Rama Chellappa, name: Andrew Gordon Wilson, name: Tom Goldstein

Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a
backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years
ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network.
However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones
pretrained using various algorithms and datasets. While this abundance of
choice has led to performance increases for a range of systems, it is difficult
for practitioners to make informed decisions about which backbone to choose.
Battle of the Backbones (BoB) makes this choice easier by benchmarking a
diverse suite of pretrained models, including vision-language models, those
trained via self-supervised learning, and the Stable Diffusion backbone, across
a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object
detection to OOD generalization and more. Furthermore, BoB sheds light on
promising directions for the research community to advance computer vision by
illuminating strengths and weakness of existing approaches through a
comprehensive analysis conducted on more than 1500 training runs. While vision
transformers (ViTs) and self-supervised learning (SSL) are increasingly
popular, we find that convolutional neural networks pretrained in a supervised
fashion on large training sets still perform best on most tasks among the
models we consider. Moreover, in apples-to-apples comparisons on the same
architectures and similarly sized pretraining datasets, we find that SSL
backbones are highly competitive, indicating that future works should perform
SSL pretraining with advanced architectures and larger pretraining datasets. We
release the raw results of our experiments along with code that allows
researchers to put their own backbones through the gauntlet here:
https://github.com/hsouri/Battle-of-the-Backbones