We present an approach to utilize large amounts of web data for learning
CNNs. Specifically inspired by curriculum learning, we present a two-step
approach for CNN training. First, we use easy images to train an initial visual
representation. We then use this initial CNN and adapt it to harder, more
realistic images by leveraging the structure of data and categories. We
demonstrate that our two-stage CNN outperforms a fine-tuned CNN trained on
ImageNet on Pascal VOC 2012. We also demonstrate the strength of webly
supervised learning by localizing objects in web images and training a R-CNN
style detector. It achieves the best performance on VOC 2007 where no VOC
training data is used. Finally, we show our approach is quite robust to noise
and performs comparably even when we use image search results from March 2013
(pre-CNN image search era)