  Representing features at multiple scales is of great importance for numerous
vision tasks. Recent advances in backbone convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
continually demonstrate stronger multi-scale representation ability, leading to
consistent performance gains on a wide range of applications. However, most
existing methods represent the multi-scale features in a layer-wise manner. In
this paper, we propose a novel building block for CNNs, namely Res2Net, by
constructing hierarchical residual-like connections within one single residual
block. The Res2Net represents multi-scale features at a granular level and
increases the range of receptive fields for each network layer. The proposed
Res2Net block can be plugged into the state-of-the-art backbone CNN models,
e.g., ResNet, ResNeXt, and DLA. We evaluate the Res2Net block on all these
models and demonstrate consistent performance gains over baseline models on
widely-used datasets, e.g., CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Further ablation studies
and experimental results on representative computer vision tasks, i.e., object
detection, class activation mapping, and salient object detection, further
verify the superiority of the Res2Net over the state-of-the-art baseline
methods. The source code and trained models are available on
https://mmcheng.net/res2net/.
