ConvNets Match Vision Transformers at Scale
Authors: name: Samuel L. Smith, name: Andrew Brock, name: Leonard Berrada, name: Soham De

Many researchers believe that ConvNets perform well on small or moderately
sized datasets, but are not competitive with Vision Transformers when given
access to datasets on the web-scale. We challenge this belief by evaluating a
performant ConvNet architecture pre-trained on JFT-4B, a large labelled dataset
of images often used for training foundation models. We consider pre-training
compute budgets between 0.4k and 110k TPU-v4 core compute hours, and train a
series of networks of increasing depth and width from the NFNet model family.
We observe a log-log scaling law between held out loss and compute budget.
After fine-tuning on ImageNet, NFNets match the reported performance of Vision
Transformers with comparable compute budgets. Our strongest fine-tuned model
achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 90.4%.