Model Zoo
A Model Zoo is a centralized repository or collection of pre-trained machine learning models, typically hosted by frameworks, research institutions, or companies. It provides developers and researchers with ready-to-use models for tasks like image classification, object detection, natural language processing, and more, often including code, weights, and documentation. This accelerates development by allowing reuse of proven models instead of training from scratch.
Developers should use a Model Zoo when they need to quickly prototype or deploy machine learning applications without the computational cost and time of training models from scratch, such as in computer vision projects using TensorFlow Hub or PyTorch Hub. It's particularly valuable for transfer learning, where pre-trained models are fine-tuned on specific datasets, and for benchmarking or research comparisons to leverage state-of-the-art implementations.