  He et al. (2018) have called into question the utility of pre-training by
showing that training from scratch can often yield similar performance to
pre-training. We show that although pre-training may not improve performance on
traditional classification metrics, it improves model robustness and
uncertainty estimates. Through extensive experiments on adversarial examples,
label corruption, class imbalance, out-of-distribution detection, and
confidence calibration, we demonstrate large gains from pre-training and
complementary effects with task-specific methods. We introduce adversarial
pre-training and show approximately a 10% absolute improvement over the
previous state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness. In some cases, using
pre-training without task-specific methods also surpasses the state-of-the-art,
highlighting the need for pre-training when evaluating future methods on
robustness and uncertainty tasks.
