Battle of the Backbones

Broad benchmarking: Compares CNN and ViT backbones across classification, segmentation, detection, retrieval, and other tasks at matched compute.

Pretraining recipes matter: Shows that pretraining scheme (supervised, self-supervised, language-image) often matters more than the architecture family.

ViT ≠ universal winner: Vision transformers are not universally superior - strong CNN backbones remain competitive or better on several downstream tasks.

Practitioner guide: Functions as a decision reference - the report explicitly maps from task characteristics to recommended backbone + pretraining combinations.