# Robustness in Compressed Neural Networks for Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.05509 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05509/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Robustness in Object Detection: Autonomous Driving when Winter is Coming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07484/) (2019)
- [An Investigation of Why Overparameterization Exacerbates Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04345/) (2020)
- [A Fourier Perspective on Model Robustness in Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08988/) (2019)
- [No Subclass Left Behind: Fine-Grained Robustness in Coarse-Grained Classification Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12945/) (2020)
- [Why do deep convolutional networks generalize so poorly to small image transformations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12177/) (2018)
- [What Do Compressed Deep Neural Networks Forget?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05248/) (2019)
- [Overcoming Classifier Imbalance for Long-tail Object Detection with Balanced Group Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10408/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Examples Are a Natural Consequence of Test Error in Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10513/) (2019)
- [The EuroCity Persons Dataset: A Novel Benchmark for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07193/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BiBench: Benchmarking and Analyzing Network Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11233/) (2023)
- [Closer Look at the Uncertainty Estimation in Semantic Segmentation under Distributional Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00076/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking performance of object detection under image distortions in an uncontrolled environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15999/) (2022)
- [Mobiprox: Supporting Dynamic Approximate Computing on Mobiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11291/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model compression techniques allow to significantly reduce the computational cost associated with data processing by deep neural networks with only a minor decrease in average accuracy. Simultaneously, reducing the model size may have a large effect on noisy cases or objects belonging to less frequent classes. It is a crucial problem from the perspective of the models' safety, especially for object detection in the autonomous driving setting, which is considered in this work. It was shown in the paper that the sensitivity of compressed models to different distortion types is nuanced, and some of the corruptions are heavily impacted by the compression methods (i.e., additive noise), while others (blur effect) are only slightly affected. A common way to improve the robustness of models is to use data augmentation, which was confirmed to positively affect models' robustness, also for highly compressed models. It was further shown that while data imbalance methods brought only a slight increase in accuracy for the baseline model (without compression), the impact was more striking at higher compression rates for the structured pruning. Finally, methods for handling data imbalance brought a significant improvement of the pruned models' worst-detected class accuracy.
