# Revealing the Dark Secrets of Extremely Large Kernel ConvNets on Robustness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08972 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08972/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [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)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [How Do Vision Transformers Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06709/) (2022)
- [Understanding Robustness of Transformers for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14586/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Stochastic Self-Guidance for Training-Free Enhancement of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12880/) (2025)
- [USP: Unified Self-Supervised Pretraining for Image Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06132/) (2025)
- [NarrLV: Towards a Comprehensive Narrative-Centric Evaluation for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11245/) (2025)
- [CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19434/) (2025)
- [ATCTrack: Aligning Target-Context Cues with Dynamic Target States for Robust Vision-Language Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19875/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Tracking by Effectively Converting Textual Cues into Visual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19648/) (2024)
- [SFMNet: Sparse Focal Modulation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12093/) (2025)
- [Spectral-Adaptive Modulation Networks for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23947/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robustness is a vital aspect to consider when deploying deep learning models into the wild. Numerous studies have been dedicated to the study of the robustness of vision transformers (ViTs), which have dominated as the mainstream backbone choice for vision tasks since the dawn of 2020s. Recently, some large kernel convnets make a comeback with impressive performance and efficiency. However, it still remains unclear whether large kernel networks are robust and the attribution of their robustness. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive evaluation of large kernel convnets' robustness and their differences from typical small kernel counterparts and ViTs on six diverse robustness benchmark datasets. Then to analyze the underlying factors behind their strong robustness, we design experiments from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives to reveal large kernel convnets' intriguing properties that are completely different from typical convnets. Our experiments demonstrate for the first time that pure CNNs can achieve exceptional robustness comparable or even superior to that of ViTs. Our analysis on occlusion invariance, kernel attention patterns and frequency characteristics provide novel insights into the source of robustness.