Please note that NO external data (including ImageNet) can be used in both the pretraining and training phase.
All the models should train from scratch since the external information about contexts or categories can help the model learn about the test data which should be totally unseen in the training phase.
Thank you for your understanding!
Please note that when loading Pytorch vision models by default, the ImageNet pretrained weights are loaded as the initialization, which is not allowed in NICO challenge.
So please create model like "self.network = torchvision.models.resnet18(pretrained=False)" as shown in the tutorial.
Thank you for your understanding!