When does fusing hand-crafted knowledge with learned representations pay? A cost-normalized benchmark of stacking, substitution, and interference
Fusing prior knowledge with data-driven learning is attractive where data is scarce, yet no controlled account says when it helps, is redundant, or harms. We benchmark one fixed hand-crafted knowledge source, a pinned bank of Gabor targets injected only during training at $\sim$2\% overhead, against data-driven alternatives (SimCLR, SimSiam, DINO, ImageNet transfer, augmentation, learned teachers) under one frozen recipe with fixed subsets: 13 datasets, 9 backbones, 150 to 1.28M images, 32--224\,px, 2.5M--86M parameters ($\computeCells$ classification configurations over $\computeRuns$ runs, plus segmentation and detection transplants). Across the training-time combinations we measure, th...
| Authors | Ahmad AlMughrabi, Albert Clop, Benjamin Busam et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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