# Cheaper Pre-training Lunch: An Efficient Paradigm for Object Detection

Source: [Cheaper Pre-training Lunch: An Efficient Paradigm for Object Detection](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa68461e209131cea1af35>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:03:45.482Z

Authors: Dongzhan Zhou, Xinchi Zhou, Hongwen Zhang, Shuai Yi, Wanli Ouyang

Published: 2020-04-25T16:09:46.000Z

## Abstract

In this paper, we propose a general and efficient pre-training paradigm, Montage pre-training, for object detection. Montage pre-training needs only the target detection dataset while taking only 1/4 computational resources compared to the widely adopted ImageNet pre-training.To build such an efficient paradigm, we reduce the potential redundancy by carefully extracting useful samples from the original images, assembling samples in a Montage manner as input, and using an ERF-adaptive dense classification strategy for model pre-training. These designs include not only a new input pattern to improve the spatial utilization but also a novel learning objective to expand the effective receptive field of the pretrained model. The efficiency and effectiveness of Montage pre-training are validated by extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset, where the results indicate that the models using Montage pre-training are able to achieve on-par or even better detection performances compared with the ImageNet pre-training.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12178>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.12178.pdf>)