SNN: Stacked Neural Networks

Abstract: It has been proven that transfer learning provides an easy way to achieve state-of-the-art accuracies on several vision tasks by training a simple classifier on top of features obtained from pre-trained neural networks. The goal of this work is to generate better features for transfer learning from multiple publicly available pre-trained neural networks. To this end, we propose a novel architecture called Stacked Neural Networks which leverages the fast training time of transfer learning while simultaneously being much more accurate. We show that using a stacked NN architecture can result in up to 8% improvements in accuracy over state-of-the-art techniques using only one pre-trained network for transfer learning. A second aim of this work is to make network fine- tuning retain the generalizability of the base network to unseen tasks. To this end, we propose a new technique called "joint fine-tuning" that is able to give accuracies comparable to finetuning the same network individually over two datasets. We also show that a jointly finetuned network generalizes better to unseen tasks when compared to a network finetuned over a single task.