# Convolutional Neural Nets vs Vision Transformers: A SpaceNet Case Study with Balanced vs Imbalanced Regimes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03297/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [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)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a controlled comparison of a convolutional neural network (EfficientNet-B0) and a Vision Transformer (ViT-Base) on SpaceNet under two label-distribution regimes: a naturally imbalanced five-class split and a balanced-resampled split with 700 images per class (70:20:10 train/val/test). With matched preprocessing (224x224, ImageNet normalization), lightweight augmentations, and a 40-epoch budget on a single NVIDIA P100, we report accuracy, macro-F1, balanced accuracy, per-class recall, and deployment metrics (model size and latency). On the imbalanced split, EfficientNet-B0 reaches 93% test accuracy with strong macro-F1 and lower latency; ViT-Base is competitive at 93% with a larger parameter count and runtime. On the balanced split, both models are strong; EfficientNet-B0 reaches 99% while ViT-Base remains competitive, indicating that balancing narrows architecture gaps while CNNs retain an efficiency edge. We release manifests, logs, and per-image predictions to support reproducibility.