Dynamic Kernel Distillation for Efficient Pose Estimation in Videos
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore（新加坡国立大学电气与计算机工程系）；Snap Inc.（Snap公司）；ByteDance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）
Xuecheng Nie, Yuncheng Li, Linjie Luo, Ning Zhang, Jiashi Feng
Existing video-based human pose estimation methods extensively apply large networks onto every frame in the video to localize body joints, which suffer high computational cost and hardly meet the low-latency requirement in realistic applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel Dynamic Kernel Distillation (DKD) model to facilitate small networks for estimating human poses in videos, thus significantly lifting the efficiency. In particular, DKD introduces a light-weight distillator to online distill pose kernels via leveraging temporal cues from the previous frame in a one-shot feed-forward manner. Then, DKD simplifies body joint localization into a matching procedure between the pose kernels and the current frame, which can be efficiently computed via simple convolution. In this way, DKD fast transfers pose knowledge from one frame to provide compact guidance for body joint localization in the following frame, which enables utilization of small networks in video-based pose estimation. To facilitate the training process, DKD exploits a temporally adversarial training strategy that introduces a temporal discriminator to help generate temporally coherent pose kernels and pose estimation results within a long range. Experiments on Penn Action and Sub-JHMDB benchmarks demonstrate outperforming efficiency of DKD, specifically, 10x flops reduction and 2x speedup over previous best model, and its state-of-the-art accuracy.
AgentPose: Progressive Distribution Alignment via Feature Agent for Human Pose Distillation
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）；Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence, University of Surrey（萨里大学以人为本人工智能研究所）
Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Existing state-of-the-art human pose estimation methods require heavy computational resources for accurate predictions. One promising technique to obtain an accurate yet lightweight pose estimator is knowledge distillation, which distills the pose knowledge from a powerful teacher model to a less-parameterized student model. However, existing pose distillation works rely on a heavy pre-trained estimator to perform knowledge transfer and require a complex two-stage learning procedure. In this work, we investigate a novel Online Knowledge Distillation framework by distilling Human Pose structure…
Although the facial makeup transfer network has achieved high-quality performance in generating perceptually pleasing makeup images, its capability is still restricted by the massive computation and storage of the network architecture. We address this issue by compressing facial makeup transfer networks with collaborative distillation and kernel decomposition. The main idea of collaborative distillation is underpinned by a finding that the encoder-decoder pairs construct an exclusive collaborative relationship, which is regarded as a new kind of knowledge for low-level vision tasks. For kernel…
Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Compact and Efficient 6DoF Pose Estimation
SnT, University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学SnT分校）；Cristal Lab, ENSI, University of Manouba（曼努巴大学ENSI的Cristal实验室）；Infinite Orbits, Toulouse（图卢兹的Infinite Orbits）
We introduce DOPE, the first method to detect and estimate whole-body 3D human poses, including bodies, hands and faces, in the wild. Achieving this level of details is key for a number of applications that require understanding the interactions of the people with each other or with the environment. The main challenge is the lack of in-the-wild data with labeled whole-body 3D poses. In previous work, training data has been annotated or generated for simpler tasks focusing on bodies, hands or faces separately. In this work, we propose to take advantage of these datasets to train independent exp…
CleanPose: Category-Level Object Pose Estimation via Causal Learning and Knowledge Distillation
College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China（电子信息工程学院，同济大学，上海，中国）；State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems（自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室）
Knowledge distillation facilitates the training of a compact student network by using a deep teacher one. While this has achieved great success in many tasks, it remains completely unstudied for image-based 6D object pose estimation. In this work, we introduce the first knowledge distillation method driven by the 6D pose estimation task. To this end, we observe that most modern 6D pose estimation frameworks output local predictions, such as sparse 2D keypoints or dense representations, and that the compact student network typically struggles to predict such local quantities precisely. Therefor…
Krasovskii Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics（克拉斯诺夫斯基数学与力学研究所）；Ural Federal University（乌拉尔联邦大学）
We propose a response-based method of knowledge distillation (KD) for the head pose estimation problem. A student model trained by the proposed KD achieves results better than a teacher model, which is atypical for the response-based method. Our method consists of two stages. In the first stage, we trained the base neural network (NN), which has one regression head and four regression via classification (RvC) heads. We build the convolutional ensemble over the base NN using offsets of face bounding boxes over a regular grid. In the second stage, we perform KD from the convolutional ensemble in…
Cross-Domain Knowledge Distillation for Low-Resolution Human Pose Estimation
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机学院）；Institute of Machine Learning and Systems Biology, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工学院机器学习与系统生物学研究院）
In the field of human pose estimation, regression-based methods have been dominated in terms of speed, while heatmap-based methods are far ahead in terms of performance. How to take advantage of both schemes remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel human pose estimation framework termed DistilPose, which bridges the gaps between heatmap-based and regression-based methods. Specifically, DistilPose maximizes the transfer of knowledge from the teacher model (heatmap-based) to the student model (regression-based) through Token-distilling Encoder (TDE) and Simulated Heatmaps…
Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Adder Neural Networks (ANNs) which only contain additions bring us a new way of developing deep neural networks with low energy consumption. Unfortunately, there is an accuracy drop when replacing all convolution filters by adder filters. The main reason here is the optimization difficulty of ANNs using $\ell_1$-norm, in which the estimation of gradient in back propagation is inaccurate. In this paper, we present a novel method for further improving the performance of ANNs without increasing the trainable parameters via a progressive kernel based knowledge distillation (PKKD) method. A convolu…
Real-time 6D object pose estimation is essential for many real-world applications, such as robotic grasping and augmented reality. To achieve an accurate object pose estimation from RGB images in real-time, we propose an effective and lightweight model, namely High-Resolution 6D Pose Estimation Network (HRPose). We adopt the efficient and small HRNetV2-W18 as a feature extractor to reduce computational burdens while generating accurate 6D poses. With only 33\% of the model size and lower computational costs, our HRPose achieves comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art models. More…
Image-based object pose estimation sounds amazing because in real applications the shape of object is oftentimes not available or not easy to take like photos. Although it is an advantage to some extent, un-explored shape information in 3D vision learning problem looks like "flaws in jade". In this paper, we deal with the problem in a reasonable new setting, namely 3D shape is exploited in the training process, and the testing is still purely image-based. We enhance the performance of image-based methods for category-agnostic object pose estimation by exploiting 3D knowledge learned by a multi…
Amazon Lab126（亚马逊Lab126）；School of Computing, University of Utah（犹他大学计算学院）
Recovering 3D human pose from 2D joints is a highly unconstrained problem. We propose a novel neural network framework, PoseNet3D, that takes 2D joints as input and outputs 3D skeletons and SMPL body model parameters. By casting our learning approach in a student-teacher framework, we avoid using any 3D data such as paired/unpaired 3D data, motion capture sequences, depth images or multi-view images during training. We first train a teacher network that outputs 3D skeletons, using only 2D poses for training. The teacher network distills its knowledge to a student network that predicts 3D pose …
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Knowledge distillation is an effective way for model compression in deep learning. Given a large model (i.e., teacher model), it aims to improve the performance of a compact model (i.e., student model) by transferring the information from the teacher. Various information for distillation has been studied. Recently, a number of works propose to transfer the pairwise similarity between examples to distill relative information. However, most of efforts are devoted to developing different similarity measurements, while only a small matrix consisting of examples within a mini-batch is transferred a…
Although deep convolution neural networks (DCNN) have achieved excellent performance in human pose estimation, these networks often have a large number of parameters and computations, leading to the slow inference speed. For this issue, an effective solution is knowledge distillation, which transfers knowledge from a large pre-trained network (teacher) to a small network (student). However, there are some defects in the existing approaches: (I) Only a single teacher is adopted, neglecting the potential that a student can learn from multiple teachers. (II) The human segmentation mask can be reg…
Most teacher-student frameworks based on knowledge distillation (KD) depend on a strong congruent constraint on instance level. However, they usually ignore the correlation between multiple instances, which is also valuable for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a new framework named correlation congruence for knowledge distillation (CCKD), which transfers not only the instance-level information, but also the correlation between instances. Furthermore, a generalized kernel method based on Taylor series expansion is proposed to better capture the correlation between instances. Empiric…
Multi-person pose estimation plays an important role in many fields. Although previous works have researched a lot on different parts of human pose estimation, full body pose estimation for multi-person still needs further research. Our work has developed an integrated model through knowledge distillation which can estimate full body poses. Trained based on the AlphaPose system and MSCOCO2017 dataset, our model achieves 51.5 mAP on the validation dataset annotated manually by ourselves. Related resources are available at https://esflfei.github.io/esflfei.gethub.io/website.html.
Biomechanical 3D Body: Self-Supervised Distillation of Biomechanical Pose from a 3D Body Foundation Model
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab（雪莉·瑞安能力实验室）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Recent applications pose requirements of both cross-domain knowledge transfer and model compression to machine learning models due to insufficient training data and limited computational resources. In this paper, we propose a new knowledge distillation model, named Spirit Distillation (SD), which is a model compression method with multi-domain knowledge transfer. The compact student network mimics out a representation equivalent to the front part of the teacher network, through which the general knowledge can be transferred from the source domain (teacher) to the target domain (student). To fu…
Deep learning models have demonstrated remarkable success in object detection, yet their complexity and computational intensity pose a barrier to deploying them in real-world applications (e.g., self-driving perception). Knowledge Distillation (KD) is an effective way to derive efficient models. However, only a small number of KD methods tackle object detection. Also, most of them focus on mimicking the plain features of the teacher model but rarely consider how the features contribute to the final detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for knowledge distillation in object detec…
Knowledge distillation (KD), which can efficiently transfer knowledge from a cumbersome network (teacher) to a compact network (student), has demonstrated its advantages in some computer vision applications. The representation of knowledge is vital for knowledge transferring and student learning, which is generally defined in hand-crafted manners or uses the intermediate features directly. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic meta knowledge distillation method under the teacher-student architecture for the single image super-resolution task. It provides a more flexible and accurate way t…
Object re-identification (re-id) aims to identify a specific object across times or camera views, with the person re-id and vehicle re-id as the most widely studied applications. Re-id is challenging because of the variations in viewpoints, (human) poses, and occlusions. Multi-shots of the same object can cover diverse viewpoints/poses and thus provide more comprehensive information. In this paper, we propose exploiting the multi-shots of the same identity to guide the feature learning of each individual image. Specifically, we design an Uncertainty-aware Multi-shot Teacher-Student (UMTS) Netw…
Despite the success of Deep Learning (DL), the deployment of modern DL models requiring large computational power poses a significant problem for resource-constrained systems. This necessitates building compact networks that reduce computations while preserving performance. Traditional Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods that transfer knowledge from teacher to student (a) use a single-stage and (b) require the whole data set while distilling the knowledge to the student. In this work, we propose a new method called Stagewise Knowledge Distillation (SKD) which builds on traditional KD methods b…
Feature distillation is an effective way to improve the performance for a smaller student model, which has fewer parameters and lower computation cost compared to the larger teacher model. Unfortunately, there is a common obstacle - the gap in semantic feature structure between the intermediate features of teacher and student. The classic scheme prefers to transform intermediate features by adding the adaptation module, such as naive convolutional, attention-based or more complicated one. However, this introduces two problems: a) The adaptation module brings more parameters into training. b) T…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Multi-modal learning is typically performed with network architectures containing modality-specific layers and shared layers, utilizing co-registered images of different modalities. We propose a novel learning scheme for unpaired cross-modality image segmentation, with a highly compact architecture achieving superior segmentation accuracy. In our method, we heavily reuse network parameters, by sharing all convolutional kernels across CT and MRI, and only employ modality-specific internal normalization layers which compute respective statistics. To effectively train such a highly compact model,…
A Coarse-to-Fine Human Pose Estimation Method based on Two-stage Distillation and Progressive Graph Neural Network
Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Chinese Information Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University（教育部计算智能与中文信息处理重点实验室，计算机与信息技术学院，山西大学）
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）
Knowledge distillation deals with the problem of training a smaller model (Student) from a high capacity source model (Teacher) so as to retain most of its performance. Existing approaches use either the training data or meta-data extracted from it in order to train the Student. However, accessing the dataset on which the Teacher has been trained may not always be feasible if the dataset is very large or it poses privacy or safety concerns (e.g., bio-metric or medical data). Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel data-free method to train the Student from the Teacher. Without even using any …
CCSD: Cross-Modal Compositional Self-Distillation for Robust Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities
Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（上海智能自主系统研究院，同济大学）；College of Biomedical Engineering, Fudan University（生物医学工程学院，复旦大学）；School of Medicine, Tongji University（医学院，同济大学）；College of Information Engineering, China Jiliang University（信息工程学院，中国嘉兴大学）
Learning Visual Speech Representations via Cross-Modal Distillation and Joint Face-Lip Modeling
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Shaanxi Normal University（陕西师范大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；iFLYTEK Research, iFLYTEK Co., Ltd.（科大讯飞股份有限公司）；Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Service Technology for Folk SongMinistry of Culture and Tourism（文化和旅游部民歌智能计算与服务技术重点实验室）
Human pose is a useful feature for fine-grained sports action understanding. However, pose estimators are often unreliable when run on sports video due to domain shift and factors such as motion blur and occlusions. This leads to poor accuracy when downstream tasks, such as action recognition, depend on pose. End-to-end learning circumvents pose, but requires more labels to generalize. We introduce Video Pose Distillation (VPD), a weakly-supervised technique to learn features for new video domains, such as individual sports that challenge pose estimation. Under VPD, a student network learns to…
Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Institute of Big Data Research（北京大数据研究院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Distillation is a method to transfer knowledge from one model to another and often achieves higher accuracy with the same capacity. In this paper, we aim to provide a theoretical understanding on what mainly helps with the distillation. Our answer is "early stopping". Assuming that the teacher network is overparameterized, we argue that the teacher network is essentially harvesting dark knowledge from the data via early stopping. This can be justified by a new concept, {Anisotropic Information Retrieval (AIR)}, which means that the neural network tends to fit the informative information first …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Occluded person re-identification (ReID) aims to match person images with occlusion. It is fundamentally challenging because of the serious occlusion which aggravates the misalignment problem between images. At the cost of incorporating a pose estimator, many works introduce pose information to alleviate the misalignment in both training and testing. To achieve high accuracy while preserving low inference complexity, we propose a network named Pose-Guided Feature Learning with Knowledge Distillation (PGFL-KD), where the pose information is exploited to regularize the learning of semantics alig…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Available 3D human pose estimation approaches leverage different forms of strong (2D/3D pose) or weak (multi-view or depth) paired supervision. Barring synthetic or in-studio domains, acquiring such supervision for each new target environment is highly inconvenient. To this end, we cast 3D pose learning as a self-supervised adaptation problem that aims to transfer the task knowledge from a labeled source domain to a completely unpaired target. We propose to infer image-to-pose via two explicit mappings viz. image-to-latent and latent-to-pose where the latter is a pre-learned decoder obtained f…
