Pretrained dendritic ResNet-18: 4x more parameter-efficient than ResNet-34

We just released a pretrained dendritic ResNet-18 model that achieves 4x better parameter efficiency compared to scaling up to ResNet-34.

ImageNet training (from scratch):

  • ResNet-18 (11.7M params): 69.76%
  • Dendritic ResNet-18 (13.3M params): 71.95%
  • ResNet-34 (21.8M params): 73.30%

Adding 1.6M parameters via dendritic connections yields +2.19% accuracy (1.37% per million params), while jumping to ResNet-34 adds 10.1M parameters for +3.54% accuracy (0.35% per million params). **Inference performance:** 4.37ms vs ResNet-34’s 7.48ms (41% faster), 8% slower than ResNet-18’s 4.04ms.

Transfer learning benchmarks:

Dataset ResNet-18 Dendritic-18 ResNet-34
Flowers-101 87.1% 87.9% 87.9%
Oxford Pets 90.8% 91.4% 92.6%
Food-101 81.7% 82.1% 83.9%

Model and code:
HuggingFace link | Open source repo

This is a drop-in replacement for standard ResNet-18. The model is pretrained on ImageNet and ready for transfer learning. We welcome feedback on how it performs on your datasets, this is the first publicly available pretrained dendritic model.