Paper · arXiv 2404.15653
CatLIP: CLIP-level Visual Recognition Accuracy with 2.7x Faster Pre-training on Web-scale Image-Text Data
Sachin Mehta, Maxwell Horton, Fartash Faghri, Mohammad Hossein Sekhavat, Mahyar Najibi, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Oncel Tuzel, Mohammad Rastegari
A novel weakly supervised pre-training method for vision models on web-scale data reframes the task as classification to avoid pairwise similarity computations, significantly speeding up training while maintaining high representation quality.
Abstract
Contrastive learning has emerged as a transformative method for learning effective visual representations through the alignment of image and text embeddings. However, pairwise similarity computation in contrastive loss between image and text pairs poses computational challenges. This paper presents a novel weakly supervised pre-training of vision models on web-scale image-text data. The proposed method reframes pre-training on image-text data as a classification task. Consequently, it eliminates the need for pairwise similarity computations in contrastive loss, achieving a remarkable 2.7times acceleration in training speed compared to contrastive learning on web-scale data. Through extensive experiments spanning diverse vision tasks, including detection and segmentation, we demonstrate that the proposed method maintains high representation quality. Our source code along with pre-trained model weights and training recipes is available at https://github.com/apple/corenet.