automl VS efficientdet-pytorch

I'm using Google Brain's EfficientDet repo to train an object detector. What hyperparameters should I choose to increase accuracy for small objects.

EfficientDet-D0 has comparable accuracy as YOLOv3.

Code for https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00298 found: https://github.com/google/automl/efficientnetv2

7 Min Read | Paper (CoAtNet) | Paper (EfficientNetV2) | Google blog | Code

Abstract: This paper introduces EfficientNetV2, a new family of convolutional networks that have faster training speed and better parameter efficiency than previous models. To develop this family of models, we use a combination of training-aware neural architecture search and scaling, to jointly optimize training speed and parameter efficiency. The models were searched from the search space enriched with new ops such as Fused-MBConv. Our experiments show that EfficientNetV2 models train much faster than state-of- the-art models while being up to 6.8x smaller. > Our training can be further sped up by progressively increasing the image size during training, but it often causes a drop in accuracy. To compensate for this accuracy drop, we propose to adaptively adjust regularization (e.g., dropout and data augmentation) as well, such that we can achieve both fast training and good accuracy. > With progressive learning, our EfficientNetV2 significantly outperforms previous models on ImageNet and CIFAR/Cars/Flowers datasets. By pretraining on the same ImageNet21k, our EfficientNetV2 achieves 87.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet ILSVRC2012, outperforming the recent ViT by 2.0% accuracy while training 5x-11x faster using the same computing resources. Code will be available at this https URL.

However, there are papers on oriented object detectors (see https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.07732.pdf) for example. In that paper, they do achieve better results using oriented bounding boxes. If you want to go down that route, I would suggest using the EfficientDet model, because the PyTorch code that you'll find for it is quite easy to understand and modify. For example, I've taken https://github.com/zylo117/Yet-Another-EfficientDet-Pytorch, and modified it to include a "thing-ness" logit, and this was pretty easy to do. Classic EfficientDet models only include logits (aka output neurons that get softmax-ed) for each class, and if any one of these class neurons is greater than 0.5, then it is considered "a thing". Anyway - that's digression, but my point is that I've thought about adding oriented box support to an EfficientDet model, and it didn't seem to be too hard, although I haven't actually done it. If I was to start now, I would probably go with https://github.com/rwightman/efficientdet-pytorch, since Ross Wightman's models are becoming a de-facto standard in the PyTorch world for all things image-related.