Identity Model Transformation for boosting performance and efficiency in object detection network.

Modifying the structure of an existing network is a common method to further improve the performance of the network. However, modifying some layers in network often results in pre-trained weight mismatch, and fine-tune process is time-consuming and resource-inefficient. To address this issue, we propose a novel technique called Identity Model Transformation (IMT), which keep the output before and after transformation in an equal form by rigorous algebraic transformations. This approach ensures the preservation of the original model's performance when modifying layers. Additionally, IMT significantly reduces the total training time required to achieve optimal results while further enhancing network performance. IMT has established a bridge for rapid transformation between model architectures, enabling a model to quickly perform analytic continuation and derive a family of tree-like models with better performance. This model family possesses a greater potential for optimization improvements compared to a single model. Extensive experiments across various object detection tasks validated the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed IMT solution, which saved 94.76% time in fine-tuning the basic model YOLOv4-Rot on DOTA 1.5 dataset, and by using the IMT method, we saw stable performance improvements of 9.89%, 6.94%, 2.36%, and 4.86% on the four datasets: AI-TOD, DOTA1.5, coco2017, and MRSAText, respectively.