MegDet: A Large Mini-Batch Object Detector

The development of object detection in the era of deep learning, from R-CNN 11, Fast/Faster R-CNN 10, 31 to recent Mask R-CNN 14 and RetinaNet 24, mainly come from novel network, new framework, or loss design. However, mini-batch size, a key factor for the training of deep neural networks, has not been well studied for object detection. In this paper, we propose a Large Mini-Batch Object Detector (MegDet) to enable the training with a large mini-batch size up to 256, so that we can effectively utilize at most 128 GPUs to significantly shorten the training time. Technically, we suggest a warmup learning rate policy and Cross-GPU Batch Normalization, which together allow us to successfully train a large mini-batch detector in much less time (e.g., from 33 hours to 4 hours), and achieve even better accuracy. The MegDet is the backbone of our submission (mmAP 52.5%) to COCO 2017 Challenge, where we won the 1st place of Detection task.