Existing knowledge distillation methods focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), where the input samples like images lie in a grid domain, and have largely overlooked graph convolutional networks (GCN) that handle non-grid data. In this paper, we propose to our best knowledge the first dedicated approach to distilling knowledge from a pre-trained GCN model. To enable the knowledge transfer from the teacher GCN to the student, we propose a local structure preserving module that explicitly accounts for the topological semantics of the teacher. In this module, the local structure information from both the teacher and the student are extracted as distributions, and hence minimizing the distance between these distributions enables topology-aware knowledge transfer from the teacher, yielding a compact yet high-performance student model. Moreover, the proposed approach is readily extendable to dynamic graph models, where the input graphs for the teacher and the student may differ. We evaluate the proposed method on two different datasets using GCN models of different architectures, and demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art knowledge distillation performance for GCN models. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ihollywhy/DistillGCN.PyTorch.
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims at transferring knowledge from a larger well-optimized teacher network to a smaller learnable student network.Existing KD methods have mainly considered two types of knowledge, namely the individual knowledge and the relational knowledge. However, these two types of knowledge are usually modeled independently while the inherent correlations between them are largely ignored. It is critical for sufficient student network learning to integrate both individual knowledge and relational knowledge while reserving their inherent correlation. In this paper, we propose t…
Knowledge distillation field delicately designs various types of knowledge to shrink the performance gap between compact student and large-scale teacher. These existing distillation approaches simply focus on the improvement of \textit{knowledge quality}, but ignore the significant influence of \textit{knowledge quantity} on the distillation procedure. Opposed to the conventional distillation approaches, which extract knowledge from a fixed teacher computation graph, this paper explores a non-negligible research direction from a novel perspective of \textit{knowledge quantity} to further impro…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of California Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
This paper studies the potential of distilling knowledge from pre-trained models, especially Masked Autoencoders. Our approach is simple: in addition to optimizing the pixel reconstruction loss on masked inputs, we minimize the distance between the intermediate feature map of the teacher model and that of the student model. This design leads to a computationally efficient knowledge distillation framework, given 1) only a small visible subset of patches is used, and 2) the (cumbersome) teacher model only needs to be partially executed, ie, forward propagate inputs through the first few layers, …
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
This effort aims to reproduce the results of experiments and analyze the robustness of the review framework for knowledge distillation introduced in the CVPR '21 paper 'Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review' by Chen et al. Previous works in knowledge distillation only studied connections paths between the same levels of the student and the teacher, and cross-level connection paths had not been considered. Chen et al. propose a new residual learning framework to train a single student layer using multiple teacher layers. They also design a novel fusion module to condense feature maps across…
SKDF: A Simple Knowledge Distillation Framework for Distilling Open-Vocabulary Knowledge to Open-world Object Detector
College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学软件学院）
Megvii Research Nanjing（旷视科技南京研究院）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are prone to overfit small training datasets. We present a novel two-phase pipeline that leverages self-supervised learning and knowledge distillation to improve the generalization ability of CNN models for image classification under the data-deficient setting. The first phase is to learn a teacher model which possesses rich and generalizable visual representations via self-supervised learning, and the second phase is to distill the representations into a student model in a self-distillation manner, and meanwhile fine-tune the student model for the image cl…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Tencent Data Platform（腾讯数据平台）
Image virtual try-on aims to fit a garment image (target clothes) to a person image. Prior methods are heavily based on human parsing. However, slightly-wrong segmentation results would lead to unrealistic try-on images with large artifacts. Inaccurate parsing misleads parser-based methods to produce visually unrealistic results where artifacts usually occur. A recent pioneering work employed knowledge distillation to reduce the dependency of human parsing, where the try-on images produced by a parser-based method are used as supervisions to train a "student" network without relying on segment…
Can Students Beyond The Teacher? Distilling Knowledge from Teacher's Bias
Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学）；Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Human multimodal emotion recognition (MER) aims to perceive human emotions via language, visual and acoustic modalities. Despite the impressive performance of previous MER approaches, the inherent multimodal heterogeneities still haunt and the contribution of different modalities varies significantly. In this work, we mitigate this issue by proposing a decoupled multimodal distillation (DMD) approach that facilitates flexible and adaptive crossmodal knowledge distillation, aiming to enhance the discriminative features of each modality. Specially, the representation of each modality is decouple…
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology（西门子公司企业技术部）；University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）
In recent years, many explanation methods have been proposed to explain individual classifications of deep neural networks. However, how to leverage the created explanations to improve the learning process has been less explored. As the privileged information, the explanations of a model can be used to guide the learning process of the model itself. In the community, another intensively investigated privileged information used to guide the training of a model is the knowledge from a powerful teacher model. The goal of this work is to leverage the self-explanation to improve the learning proces…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Pinterest；Peking University（北京大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Existing online knowledge distillation approaches either adopt the student with the best performance or construct an ensemble model for better holistic performance. However, the former strategy ignores other students' information, while the latter increases the computational complexity during deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel method for online knowledge distillation, termed FFSD, which comprises two key components: Feature Fusion and Self-Distillation, towards solving the above problems in a unified framework. Different from previous works, where all students are treated equally, t…
Deformable registration is a crucial step in many medical procedures such as image-guided surgery and radiation therapy. Most recent learning-based methods focus on improving the accuracy by optimizing the non-linear spatial correspondence between the input images. Therefore, these methods are computationally expensive and require modern graphic cards for real-time deployment. In this paper, we introduce a new Light-weight Deformable Registration network that significantly reduces the computational cost while achieving competitive accuracy. In particular, we propose a new adversarial learning …
The crux of knowledge distillation is to effectively train a resource-limited student model with the guide of a pre-trained larger teacher model. However, when there is a large difference between the model complexities of teacher and student (i.e., capacity gap), knowledge distillation loses its strength in transferring knowledge from the teacher to the student, thus training a weaker student. To mitigate the impact of the capacity gap, we introduce knowledge distillation via intermediate heads. By extending the intermediate layers of the teacher (at various depths) with classifier heads, we c…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Heidelberg（海德堡大学）
Recent advances have indicated the strengths of self-supervised pre-training for improving representation learning on downstream tasks. Existing works often utilize self-supervised pre-trained models by fine-tuning on downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning does not generalize to the case when one needs to build a customized model architecture different from the self-supervised model. In this work, we formulate a new knowledge distillation framework to transfer the knowledge from self-supervised pre-trained models to any other student network by a novel approach named Embedding Graph Alignment.…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Tencent PCG（腾讯平台与内容事业群）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Having access to multi-modal cues (e.g. vision and audio) empowers some cognitive tasks to be done faster compared to learning from a single modality. In this work, we propose to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous modalities, even though these data modalities may not be semantically correlated. Rather than directly aligning the representations of different modalities, we compose audio, image, and video representations across modalities to uncover richer multi-modal knowledge. Our main idea is to learn a compositional embedding that closes the cross-modal semantic gap and captures the task…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are energy-efficient computing architectures that exchange spikes for processing information, unlike classical Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Due to this, SNNs are better suited for real-life deployments. However, similar to ANNs, SNNs also benefit from deeper architectures to obtain improved performance. Furthermore, like the deep ANNs, the memory, compute and power requirements of SNNs also increase with model size, and model compression becomes a necessity. Knowledge distillation is a model compression technique that enables transferring the learning of a la…
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机科学与技术系（注：此处原机构为南京大学，具体实验室为 Novel Software Technology 重点实验室，按要求提取到大学级别））；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）
We tackle the long-tailed visual recognition problem from the knowledge distillation perspective by proposing a Distill the Virtual Examples (DiVE) method. Specifically, by treating the predictions of a teacher model as virtual examples, we prove that distilling from these virtual examples is equivalent to label distribution learning under certain constraints. We show that when the virtual example distribution becomes flatter than the original input distribution, the under-represented tail classes will receive significant improvements, which is crucial in long-tailed recognition. The proposed …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication（北京邮电大学）
Although deep neural networks have enjoyed remarkable success across a wide variety of tasks, their ever-increasing size also imposes significant overhead on deployment. To compress these models, knowledge distillation was proposed to transfer knowledge from a cumbersome (teacher) network into a lightweight (student) network. However, guidance from a teacher does not always improve the generalization of students, especially when the size gap between student and teacher is large. Previous works argued that it was due to the high certainty of the teacher, resulting in harder labels that were dif…
On Distilling the Displacement Knowledge for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Southeast University), Ministry of Education（教育部新一代人工智能技术及交叉应用重点实验室（东南大学））
Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur（焦特布尔印度理工学院）
Knowledge distillation is a common technique for improving the performance of a shallow student network by transferring information from a teacher network, which in general, is comparatively large and deep. These teacher networks are pre-trained and often uncalibrated, as no calibration technique is applied to the teacher model while training. Calibration of a network measures the probability of correctness for any of its predictions, which is critical in high-risk domains. In this paper, we study how to obtain a calibrated student from an uncalibrated teacher. Our approach relies on the fusio…
Knowledge Distillation is a technique which aims to utilize dark knowledge to compress and transfer information from a vast, well-trained neural network (teacher model) to a smaller, less capable neural network (student model) with improved inference efficiency. This approach of distilling knowledge has gained popularity as a result of the prohibitively complicated nature of such cumbersome models for deployment on edge computing devices. Generally, the teacher models used to teach smaller student models are cumbersome in nature and expensive to train. To eliminate the necessity for a cumberso…
Neural network compression and acceleration are widely demanded currently due to the resource constraints on most deployment targets. In this paper, through analyzing the filter activation, gradients, and visualizing the filters' functionality in convolutional neural networks, we show that the filters in higher layers learn extremely task-specific features, which are exclusive for only a small subset of the overall tasks, or even a single class. Based on such findings, we reveal the critical paths of information flow for different classes. And by their intrinsic property of exclusiveness, we p…
Distilling Missing Modality Knowledge from Ultrasound for Endometriosis Diagnosis with Magnetic Resonance Images
Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, Flinders University（弗林德斯大学弗林德斯健康与医学研究所）；Robinson Research Institute, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学罗宾逊研究所）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Lip reading has witnessed unparalleled development in recent years thanks to deep learning and the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite the encouraging results achieved, the performance of lip reading, unfortunately, remains inferior to the one of its counterpart speech recognition, due to the ambiguous nature of its actuations that makes it challenging to extract discriminant features from the lip movement videos. In this paper, we propose a new method, termed as Lip by Speech (LIBS), of which the goal is to strengthen lip reading by learning from speech recognizers. The rationale be…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Knowledge distillation learns a lightweight student model that mimics a cumbersome teacher. Existing methods regard the knowledge as the feature of each instance or their relations, which is the instance-level knowledge only from the teacher model, i.e., the local knowledge. However, the empirical studies show that the local knowledge is much noisy in object detection tasks, especially on the blurred, occluded, or small instances. Thus, a more intrinsic approach is to measure the representations of instances w.r.t. a group of common basis vectors in the two feature spaces of the teacher and th…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from the teacher network to the student one, with the goal of greatly improving the performance of the student network. Previous methods mostly focus on proposing feature transformation and loss functions between the same level's features to improve the effectiveness. We differently study the factor of connection path cross levels between teacher and student networks, and reveal its great importance. For the first time in knowledge distillation, cross-stage connection paths are proposed. Our new review mechanism is effective and structurally simple. O…
This paper demonstrates a novel approach to improve face-recognition pose-invariance using semantic-segmentation features. The proposed Seg-Distilled-ID network jointly learns identification and semantic-segmentation tasks, where the segmentation task is then "distilled" (MobileNet encoder). Performance is benchmarked against three state-of-the-art encoders on a publicly available data-set emphasizing head-pose variations. Experimental evaluations show the Seg-Distilled-ID network shows notable robustness benefits, achieving 99.9% test-accuracy in comparison to 81.6% on ResNet-101, 96.1% on VG…
In this paper, we introduce the semantic knowledge of medical images from their diagnostic reports to provide an inspirational network training and an interpretable prediction mechanism with our proposed novel multimodal neural network, namely TandemNet. Inside TandemNet, a language model is used to represent report text, which cooperates with the image model in a tandem scheme. We propose a novel dual-attention model that facilitates high-level interactions between visual and semantic information and effectively distills useful features for prediction. In the testing stage, TandemNet can make…
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）
Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) aims to tackle the object detection problem using only labeled image categories as supervision. A common approach used in WSOD to deal with the lack of localization information is Multiple Instance Learning, and in recent years methods started adopting Multiple Instance Detection Networks (MIDN), which allows training in an end-to-end fashion. In general, these methods work by selecting the best instance from a pool of candidates and then aggregating other instances based on similarity. In this work, we claim that carefully selecting the aggregation cr…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
This paper explores the use of a soft ground-truth mask ("soft mask'') to train a Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) for segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) lesions. Detection and segmentation of MS lesions is a complex task largely due to the extreme unbalanced data, with very small number of lesion pixels that can be used for training. Utilizing the anatomical knowledge that the lesion surrounding pixels may also include some lesion level information, we suggest to increase the data set of the lesion class with neighboring pixel data - with a reduced confidence weight. A soft mask…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex人工智能研究院）
Knowledge distillation is widely adopted in semantic segmentation to reduce the computation cost.The previous knowledge distillation methods for semantic segmentation focus on pixel-wise feature alignment and intra-class feature variation distillation, neglecting to transfer the knowledge of the inter-class distance in the feature space, which is important for semantic segmentation. To address this issue, we propose an Inter-class Distance Distillation (IDD) method to transfer the inter-class distance in the feature space from the teacher network to the student network. Furthermore, semantic s…
Among the neural network compression techniques, knowledge distillation is an effective one which forces a simpler student network to mimic the output of a larger teacher network. However, most of such model distillation methods focus on the image-level classification task. Directly adapting these methods to the task of semantic segmentation only brings marginal improvements. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective knowledge representation referred to as pixel-wise feature similarities (PFS) to tackle the challenging distillation problem of semantic segmentation. The developed PFS en…
Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology（广东省信息安全技术重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education（教育部机器智能与先进计算重点实验室）
Distilling Expert Surgical Knowledge: How to train local surgical VLMs for anatomy explanation in Complete Mesocolic Excision
1 Institute of Medical Technology；Intelligent Systems, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany 2 Department of General, Visceral；Thoracic Surgery, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany
Current state-of-the-art object detectors are at the expense of high computational costs and are hard to deploy to low-end devices. Knowledge distillation, which aims at training a smaller student network by transferring knowledge from a larger teacher model, is one of the promising solutions for model miniaturization. In this paper, we investigate each module of a typical detector in depth, and propose a general distillation framework that adaptively transfers knowledge from teacher to student according to the task specific priors. The intuition is that simply distilling all information from …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Tianjin AiForward Science and Technology Co., Ltd.（天津爱前向科技有限公司）
Previous works on human motion prediction follow the pattern of building a mapping relation between the sequence observed and the one to be predicted. However, due to the inherent complexity of multivariate time series data, it still remains a challenge to find the extrapolation relation between motion sequences. In this paper, we present a new prediction pattern, which introduces previously overlooked human poses, to implement the prediction task from the view of interpolation. These poses exist after the predicted sequence, and form the privileged sequence. To be specific, we first propose a…
Peking University（北京大学）；Tencent Medical AI Lab（腾讯医疗人工智能实验室）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Automatically generating radiology reports can improve current clinical practice in diagnostic radiology. On one hand, it can relieve radiologists from the heavy burden of report writing; On the other hand, it can remind radiologists of abnormalities and avoid the misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis. Yet, this task remains a challenging job for data-driven neural networks, due to the serious visual and textual data biases. To this end, we propose a Posterior-and-Prior Knowledge Exploring-and-Distilling approach (PPKED) to imitate the working patterns of radiologists, who will first examine the a…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore（SmartMore（公司））
Effectively structuring deep knowledge plays a pivotal role in transfer from teacher to student, especially in semantic vision tasks. In this paper, we present a simple knowledge structure to exploit and encode information inside the detection system to facilitate detector knowledge distillation. Specifically, aiming at solving the feature imbalance problem while further excavating the missing relation inside semantic instances, we design a graph whose nodes correspond to instance proposal-level features and edges represent the relation between nodes. To further refine this graph, we design an…
Recently, the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has made remarkable progress in single image super resolution(SISR). However, blindly using the residual structure and dense structure to extract features from LR images, can cause the network to be bloated and difficult to train. To address these problems, we propose a simple and efficient distilling with residual network(DRN) for SISR. In detail, we propose residual distilling block(RDB) containing two branches, while one branch performs a residual operation and the other branch distills effective information. To further improve efficienc…
Bootstrapping Chest CT Image Understanding by Distilling Knowledge from X-ray Expert Models
DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴达摩院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院苏州生物医学工程技术研究所）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of College of Medicine, Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）
针对胸部 CT 缺乏大规模多病种标注数据的问题，本文提出从预训练 2D X-ray 专家模型蒸馏诊断知识，并结合语言引导检索与鲁棒对比学习，提升 3D CT 理解和报告生成能力。
This paper presents a novel method to distill knowledge from a deep pose regressor network for efficient Visual Odometry (VO). Standard distillation relies on "dark knowledge" for successful knowledge transfer. As this knowledge is not available in pose regression and the teacher prediction is not always accurate, we propose to emphasize the knowledge transfer only when we trust the teacher. We achieve this by using teacher loss as a confidence score which places variable relative importance on the teacher prediction. We inject this confidence score to the main training task via Attentive Imit…
