# EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6,442 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 6442)

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- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models: Optimizing Speed and Success](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19645/) (2025)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13630/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) are commonly developed at a fixed resource budget, and then scaled up for better accuracy if more resources are available. In this paper, we systematically study model scaling and identify that carefully balancing network depth, width, and resolution can lead to better performance. Based on this observation, we propose a new scaling method that uniformly scales all dimensions of depth/width/resolution using a simple yet highly effective compound coefficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on scaling up MobileNets and ResNet. To go even further, we use neural architecture search to design a new baseline network and scale it up to obtain a family of models, called EfficientNets, which achieve much better accuracy and efficiency than previous ConvNets. In particular, our EfficientNet-B7 achieves state-of-the-art 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, while being 8.4x smaller and 6.1x faster on inference than the best existing ConvNet. Our EfficientNets also transfer well and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-100 (91.7%), Flowers (98.8%), and 3 other transfer learning datasets, with an order of magnitude fewer parameters. Source code is at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.