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Main Authors: Rios, Edwin Arkel, Surya, Augusto Christian, Gosal, Oswin, Mikael, Fernando, Nicole, Mary Madeline, Jang, Kisoon, Lai, Bo-Cheng, Hu, Min-Chun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18700
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author Rios, Edwin Arkel
Surya, Augusto Christian
Gosal, Oswin
Mikael, Fernando
Nicole, Mary Madeline
Jang, Kisoon
Lai, Bo-Cheng
Hu, Min-Chun
author_facet Rios, Edwin Arkel
Surya, Augusto Christian
Gosal, Oswin
Mikael, Fernando
Nicole, Mary Madeline
Jang, Kisoon
Lai, Bo-Cheng
Hu, Min-Chun
contents Prior work on fine-grained image recognition (FGIR) has established the importance of the backbone selection, but has neglected the accuracy-vs-cost trade-offs under different training and evaluation settings. In this work we conduct a large-scale study with over 2000 experiments across 6 training and evaluation settings, 9 pretrained backbones, and 17 datasets. Preliminary observations on the effectiveness of data augmentation for fine-grained training motivate us to extend Counterfactual Attention Learning (CAL), a state-of-the-art method based on data-aware cropping and masking augmentations, with cross-image discriminative region mixing augmentation. We also propose an efficient evaluation-only variant that maintains competitive accuracy while reducing inference costs by forfeiting the forward pass on discriminative crops that is normally used by CAL and similar FGIR methods. Our results show that data-aware augmentations during training only can enable a model to achieve excellent accuracy even without crops, significantly reducing inference costs. To support future research we share our code and checkpoints at: \url{https://github.com/arkel23/FGIR-Backbones}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18700
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Large-Scale Study on the Accuracy vs Cost Trade-offs of Training and Evaluation Settings in Fine-Grained Image Recognition
Rios, Edwin Arkel
Surya, Augusto Christian
Gosal, Oswin
Mikael, Fernando
Nicole, Mary Madeline
Jang, Kisoon
Lai, Bo-Cheng
Hu, Min-Chun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2; I.4
Prior work on fine-grained image recognition (FGIR) has established the importance of the backbone selection, but has neglected the accuracy-vs-cost trade-offs under different training and evaluation settings. In this work we conduct a large-scale study with over 2000 experiments across 6 training and evaluation settings, 9 pretrained backbones, and 17 datasets. Preliminary observations on the effectiveness of data augmentation for fine-grained training motivate us to extend Counterfactual Attention Learning (CAL), a state-of-the-art method based on data-aware cropping and masking augmentations, with cross-image discriminative region mixing augmentation. We also propose an efficient evaluation-only variant that maintains competitive accuracy while reducing inference costs by forfeiting the forward pass on discriminative crops that is normally used by CAL and similar FGIR methods. Our results show that data-aware augmentations during training only can enable a model to achieve excellent accuracy even without crops, significantly reducing inference costs. To support future research we share our code and checkpoints at: \url{https://github.com/arkel23/FGIR-Backbones}
title A Large-Scale Study on the Accuracy vs Cost Trade-offs of Training and Evaluation Settings in Fine-Grained Image Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2; I.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18700