The success of deep learning in vision can be attributed to: (a) models with high capacity; (b) increased computational power; and (c) availability of large-scale labeled data. Since 2012, there have been significant advances in representation capabilities of the models and computational capabilities of GPUs. But the size of the biggest dataset has surprisingly remained constant. What will happen if we increase the dataset size by 10× or 100×? This paper takes a step towards clearing the clouds of mystery surrounding the relationship between ‘enormous data’ and visual deep learning. By exploiting the JFT-300M dataset which has more than 375M noisy labels for 300M images, we investigate how the performance of current vision tasks would change if this data was used for representation learning. Our paper delivers some surprising (and some expected) findings. First, we find that the performance on vision tasks increases logarithmically based on volume of training data size. Second, we show that representation learning (or pretraining) still holds a lot of promise. One can improve performance on many vision tasks by just training a better base model. Finally, as expected, we present new state-of-the art results for different vision tasks including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and human pose estimation. Our sincere hope is that this inspires vision community to not undervalue the data and develop collective efforts in building larger datasets. Read More

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Eugene Wigner’s article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”1 examines why so much of physics can be neatly explained with simple mathematical formulas such as f = ma or e = mc2. Meanwhile, sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics. Economists suffer from physics envy over their inability to neatly model human behavior. An informal, incomplete grammar of the English language runs over 1,700 pages.2 Perhaps when it comes to natural language processing and related fields, we’re doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But if that’s so, we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.

One of us, as an undergraduate at Brown University, remembers the excitement of having access to the Brown Corpus, containing one million English words.3 Since then, our fi eld has seen several notable corpora that are about 100 times larger, and in 2006, Google released a trillion-word corpus with frequency counts for all sequences up to five words long.4 In some ways this corpus is a step backwards from the Brown Corpus: it’s taken from unfiltered Web pages and thus contains incomplete sentences, spelling errors, grammatical errors, and all sorts of other errors. It’s not annotated with carefully hand-corrected part-of-speech tags. But the fact that it’s a million times larger than the Brown Corpus outweighs these drawbacks. A trillion-word corpus—along with other Web-derived corpora of millions, billions, or trillions of links, videos, images, tables, and user interactions—captures even very rare aspects of human behavior. So, this corpus could serve as the basis of a complete model for certain tasks—if only we knew how to extract the model from the data. Read More

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