Pretraining Helps When Capacity Allows: Evidence from Ultra-Small ConvNets

Robust visual recognition on embedded platforms requires models that both generalize out-of-distribution (OOD) and fit into tiny compute/memory budgets. While pre-training is a standard route to robustness for mid/large backbones, its value in the ultra-small regime remains unclear. We present a capacity-aware study of pre-training for two efficient ConvNet families (EfficientNet and MobileNetV3) scaled from "small"to "ultra-small"via a simple, reproducible recipe. We compare three initializations - ImageNet→COCO pretraining, ImageNet classification pretraining, and training from scratch - on two axes of distribution shift: (i) cross-dataset RGB→RGB transfer between LLVIP and FLIR (ii) cross-modality detection where models are fine-tuned on RGB and evaluated on infrared (IR). A complementary classification study on DomainNet probes whether the trends extend beyond detection. Across settings, we find that pretraining's benefit is conditional on both backbone capacity and shift difficulty. Task-aligned Imagenet→COCO pretraining is the most reliable starting point at moderate sizes and for the easier transfer direction. In the low-capacity regimes, differences are typically within run-to-run variation, and training from scratch can match or surpass pre-training. Classification mirrors this capacity gating. Our results test the premise "pretraining always helps"and instead quantify when task-aligned pretraining pays off for ultra-small backbones and when it likely does not 1.