diff --git a/docs/changelog.md b/docs/changelog.md
index d0fe20a249..ce5152f752 100644
--- a/docs/changelog.md
+++ b/docs/changelog.md
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
 
 **Improvements**
 - Set default values of 'average_clips' in each config file so that there is no need to set it explicitly during testing in most cases ([#232](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmaction2/pull/232))
+- Add `cfg-options` in arguments to override some settings in the used config for convenience ([#212](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmaction2/pull/212))
 
 **Bug Fixes**
 - Fix the potential bug for default value in dataset_setting ([#245](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmaction2/pull/245))
diff --git a/tools/test.py b/tools/test.py
index 62e7ece693..ffa2093139 100644
--- a/tools/test.py
+++ b/tools/test.py
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
 
 import mmcv
 import torch
+from mmcv import Config, DictAction
 from mmcv.cnn import fuse_conv_bn
 from mmcv.parallel import MMDataParallel, MMDistributedDataParallel
 from mmcv.runner import get_dist_info, init_dist, load_checkpoint
@@ -41,6 +42,14 @@ def parse_args():
         help='tmp directory used for collecting results from multiple '
         'workers, available when gpu-collect is not specified')
     parser.add_argument('--options', nargs='+', help='custom options')
+    parser.add_argument(
+        '--cfg-options',
+        nargs='+',
+        action=DictAction,
+        default={},
+        help='override some settings in the used config, the key-value pair '
+        'in xxx=yyy format will be merged into config file. For example, '
+        "'--cfg-options model.backbone.depth=18 model.backbone.with_cp=True'")
     parser.add_argument(
         '--average-clips',
         choices=['score', 'prob', None],
@@ -72,7 +81,9 @@ def merge_configs(cfg1, cfg2):
 def main():
     args = parse_args()
 
-    cfg = mmcv.Config.fromfile(args.config)
+    cfg = Config.fromfile(args.config)
+
+    cfg.merge_from_dict(args.cfg_options)
 
     # Load output_config from cfg
     output_config = cfg.get('output_config', {})
diff --git a/tools/train.py b/tools/train.py
index 9ed8359a78..c853ac3823 100644
--- a/tools/train.py
+++ b/tools/train.py
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 
 import mmcv
 import torch
-from mmcv import Config
+from mmcv import Config, DictAction
 from mmcv.runner import init_dist, set_random_seed
 from mmcv.utils import get_git_hash
 
@@ -45,6 +45,14 @@ def parse_args():
         '--deterministic',
         action='store_true',
         help='whether to set deterministic options for CUDNN backend.')
+    parser.add_argument(
+        '--cfg-options',
+        nargs='+',
+        action=DictAction,
+        default={},
+        help='override some settings in the used config, the key-value pair '
+        'in xxx=yyy format will be merged into config file. For example, '
+        "'--cfg-options model.backbone.depth=18 model.backbone.with_cp=True'")
     parser.add_argument(
         '--launcher',
         choices=['none', 'pytorch', 'slurm', 'mpi'],
@@ -62,6 +70,9 @@ def main():
     args = parse_args()
 
     cfg = Config.fromfile(args.config)
+
+    cfg.merge_from_dict(args.cfg_options)
+
     # set cudnn_benchmark
     if cfg.get('cudnn_benchmark', False):
         torch.backends.cudnn.benchmark = True