InceptionNeXt: When Inception Meets ConvNeXt

This is a PyTorch implementation of InceptionNeXt proposed by our paper "InceptionNeXt: When Inception Meets ConvNeXt". Many thanks to Ross Wightman, InceptionNeXt is integrated into timm.

TLDR: To speed up ConvNeXt, we build InceptionNeXt by decomposing the large kernel dpethweise convolution with Inception style. Our InceptionNeXt-T enjoys both ResNet-50’s speed and ConvNeXt-T’s accuracy.

Requirements

Our models are trained and tested in the environment of PyTorch 1.13, NVIDIA CUDA 11.7.1 and timm 0.6.11 (pip install timm==0.6.11). If you use docker, check Dockerfile that we used.

Data preparation: ImageNet with the following folder structure, you can extract ImageNet by this script.

│imagenet/
├──train/
│  ├── n01440764
│  │   ├── n01440764_10026.JPEG
│  │   ├── n01440764_10027.JPEG
│  │   ├── ......
│  ├── ......
├──val/
│  ├── n01440764
│  │   ├── ILSVRC2012_val_00000293.JPEG
│  │   ├── ILSVRC2012_val_00002138.JPEG
│  │   ├── ......
│  ├── ......

Models

InceptionNeXt trained on ImageNet-1K

Model	Resolution	Params	MACs	Train throughput	Infer. throughput	Top1 Acc
resnet50	224	26M	4.1G	969	3149	78.4
convnext_tiny	224	29M	4.5G	575	2413	82.1
inceptionnext_tiny	224	28M	4.2G	901	2900	82.3
inceptionnext_small	224	49M	8.4G	521	1750	83.5
inceptionnext_base	224	87M	14.9G	375	1244	84.0
inceptionnext_base_384	384	87M	43.6G	139	428	85.2

ConvNeXt variants trained on ImageNet-1K

Model	Resolution	Params	MACs	Train throughput	Infer. throughput	Top1 Acc
resnet50	224	26M	4.1G	969	3149	78.4
convnext_tiny	224	29M	4.5G	575	2413	82.1
convnext_tiny_k5	224	29M	4.4G	675	2704	82.0
convnext_tiny_k3	224	28M	4.4G	798	2802	81.5
convnext_tiny_k3_par1_2	224	28M	4.4G	818	2740	81.4
convnext_tiny_k3_par3_8	224	28M	4.4G	847	2762	81.4
convnext_tiny_k3_par1_4	224	28M	4.4G	871	2808	81.3
convnext_tiny_k3_par1_8	224	28M	4.4G	901	2833	80.8
convnext_tiny_k3_par1_16	224	28M	4.4G	916	2846	80.1

The throughputs are measured on an A100 with full precisioni and batch size of 128. See Benchmarking throughput.

Usage

We also provide a Colab notebook which run the steps to perform inference with InceptionNeXt:

Validation

To evaluate our CAFormer-S18 models, run:

MODEL=inceptionnext_tiny
python3 validate.py /path/to/imagenet  --model $MODEL -b 128 \
  --pretrained

Benchmarking throughput

On the environment described above, we benchmark throughputs on an A100 with batch size of 128. The beter results of "Channel First" and "Channel Last" memory layouts are reported.

For Channel First:

MODEL=inceptionnext_tiny # convnext_tiny
python3 benchmark.py /path/to/imagenet  --model $MODEL

For Channel Last:

MODEL=inceptionnext_tiny # convnext_tiny
python3 benchmark.py /path/to/imagenet  --model $MODEL --channel-last

Train

We use batch size of 4096 by default and we show how to train models with 8 GPUs. For multi-node training, adjust --grad-accum-steps according to your situations.

DATA_PATH=/path/to/imagenet
CODE_PATH=/path/to/code/inceptionnext # modify code path here


ALL_BATCH_SIZE=4096
NUM_GPU=8
GRAD_ACCUM_STEPS=4 # Adjust according to your GPU numbers and memory size.
let BATCH_SIZE=ALL_BATCH_SIZE/NUM_GPU/GRAD_ACCUM_STEPS


MODEL=inceptionnext_tiny # inceptionnext_small, inceptionnext_base
DROP_PATH=0.1 # 0.3, 0.4


cd $CODE_PATH && sh distributed_train.sh $NUM_GPU $DATA_PATH \
--model $MODEL --opt adamw --lr 4e-3 --warmup-epochs 20 \
-b $BATCH_SIZE --grad-accum-steps $GRAD_ACCUM_STEPS \
--drop-path $DROP_PATH

Training (fine-tuning) scripts of other models are shown in scripts.

Bibtex

@article{yu2023inceptionnext,
  title={InceptionNeXt: when inception meets convnext},
  author={Yu, Weihao and Zhou, Pan and Yan, Shuicheng and Wang, Xinchao},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.16900},
  year={2023}
}

Acknowledgment

Weihao Yu would like to thank TRC program and GCP research credits for the support of partial computational resources. Our implementation is based on pytorch-image-models, poolformer, ConvNeXt and metaformer.