# ResNet strikes back: An improved training procedure in timm

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.00476 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00476/

## Key facts

- Cited by 368 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 368)

- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [Rotary Position Embedding for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13298/) (2024)
- [MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08083/) (2024)
- [Convolutional Neural Operators for robust and accurate learning of PDEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01178/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10536/) (2022)
- [Patches Are All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09792/) (2022)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [Vision GNN: An Image is Worth Graph of Nodes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00272/) (2022)
- [A Self-Supervised Descriptor for Image Copy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10261/) (2022)
- [Adan: Adaptive Nesterov Momentum Algorithm for Faster Optimizing Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06677/) (2022)
- [Fake it till you make it: Learning transferable representations from synthetic ImageNet clones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08420/) (2022)
- [SpikingJelly: An open-source machine learning infrastructure platform for spike-based intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16620/) (2023)
- [Separable Self-attention for Mobile Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02680/) (2022)
- [FastViT: A Fast Hybrid Vision Transformer using Structural Reparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14189/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Neural Scaling Laws in Language and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06640/) (2022)
- [MetaFormer Baselines for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13452/) (2022)
- [Retrieval Augmented Classification for Long-Tail Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11233/) (2022)
- [Spike-driven Transformer V2: Meta Spiking Neural Network Architecture Inspiring the Design of Next-generation Neuromorphic Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03663/) (2024)
- [Inception Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12956/) (2022)
- [The Efficiency Misnomer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12894/) (2021)
- [Better plain ViT baselines for ImageNet-1k](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01580/) (2022)
- [Designing BERT for Convolutional Networks: Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03580/) (2023)
- [Three things everyone should know about Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09795/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The influential Residual Networks designed by He et al. remain the gold-standard architecture in numerous scientific publications. They typically serve as the default architecture in studies, or as baselines when new architectures are proposed. Yet there has been significant progress on best practices for training neural networks since the inception of the ResNet architecture in 2015. Novel optimization & data-augmentation have increased the effectiveness of the training recipes. In this paper, we re-evaluate the performance of the vanilla ResNet-50 when trained with a procedure that integrates such advances. We share competitive training settings and pre-trained models in the timm open-source library, with the hope that they will serve as better baselines for future work. For instance, with our more demanding training setting, a vanilla ResNet-50 reaches 80.4% top-1 accuracy at resolution 224x224 on ImageNet-val without extra data or distillation. We also report the performance achieved with popular models with our training procedure.
