Strategic Management of Machine Learning Projects

You can sometimes break an end-to-end model into two and introduce a hand-designed component in the middle that extracts some features or does some processing to make the whole system much better. For instance, you might find that a model where there is a hand-designed component that crops to the person's face before starting on the facial recognition task when a human is found to exist in an image makes a better face recognition system compared to one that's completely end-to-end.