Knowledge distillation (KD) is a successful approach for deep neural network acceleration, with which a compact network (student) is trained by mimicking the softmax output of a pre-trained high-capacity network (teacher). In tradition, KD usually relies on access to the training samples and the parameters of the white-box teacher to acquire the transferred knowledge. However, these prerequisites are not always realistic due to storage costs or privacy issues in real-world applications. Here we propose the concept of decision-based black-box (DB3) knowledge distillation, with which the student is trained by distilling the knowledge from a black-box teacher (parameters are not accessible) that only returns classes rather than softmax outputs. We start with the scenario when the training set is accessible. We represent a sample's robustness against other classes by computing its distances to the teacher's decision boundaries and use it to construct the soft label for each training sample. After that, the student can be trained via standard KD. We then extend this approach to a more challenging scenario in which even accessing the training data is not feasible. We propose to generate pseudo samples distinguished by the teacher's decision boundaries to the largest extent and construct soft labels for them, which are used as the transfer set. We evaluate our approaches on various benchmark networks and datasets and experiment results demonstrate their effectiveness. Codes are available at: https://github.com/zwang84/zsdb3kd.
Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (AI), Deakin University（迪肯大学应用人工智能研究所）
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an efficient approach to transfer the knowledge from a large "teacher" network to a smaller "student" network. Traditional KD methods require lots of labeled training samples and a white-box teacher (parameters are accessible) to train a good student. However, these resources are not always available in real-world applications. The distillation process often happens at an external party side where we do not have access to much data, and the teacher does not disclose its parameters due to security and privacy concerns. To overcome these challenges, we propose a bl…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
Knowledge distillation has demonstrated encouraging performances in deep model compression. Most existing approaches, however, require massive labeled data to accomplish the knowledge transfer, making the model compression a cumbersome and costly process. In this paper, we investigate the practical few-shot knowledge distillation scenario, where we assume only a few samples without human annotations are available for each category. To this end, we introduce a principled dual-stage distillation scheme tailored for few-shot data. In the first step, we graft the student blocks one by one onto the…
GLiRA: Black-Box Membership Inference Attack via Knowledge Distillation
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute（人工智能研究所）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；ISP RAS Research Center for Trusted Artificial Intelligence（俄罗斯科学院信息学研究所可信人工智能研究中心）
Weight Copy and Low-Rank Adaptation for Few-Shot Distillation of Vision Transformers
University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Carol Davila”（卡罗尔·达维拉医药大学）
Black-box risk scoring models permeate our lives, yet are typically proprietary or opaque. We propose Distill-and-Compare, a model distillation and comparison approach to audit such models. To gain insight into black-box models, we treat them as teachers, training transparent student models to mimic the risk scores assigned by black-box models. We compare the student model trained with distillation to a second un-distilled transparent model trained on ground-truth outcomes, and use differences between the two models to gain insight into the black-box model. Our approach can be applied in a rea…
An accurate and efficient forecasting system is imperative to the prevention of emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19 in public health. This system requires accurate transient modeling, lower computation cost, and fewer observation data. To tackle these three challenges, we propose a novel deep learning approach using black-box knowledge distillation for both accurate and efficient transmission dynamics prediction in a practical manner. First, we leverage mixture models to develop an accurate, comprehensive, yet impractical simulation system. Next, we use simulated observation sequence…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Surface defect detection is one of the most essential processes for industrial quality inspection. Deep learning-based surface defect detection methods have shown great potential. However, the well-performed models usually require large training data and can only detect defects that appeared in the training stage. When facing incremental few-shot data, defect detection models inevitably suffer from catastrophic forgetting and misclassification problem. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a new knowledge distillation network, called Dual Knowledge Align Network (DKAN). The proposed DKA…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore（思谋科技）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to form class-agnostic models segmenting unseen classes with only a handful of annotations. Previous methods limited to the semantic feature and prototype representation suffer from coarse segmentation granularity and train-set overfitting. In this work, we design Hierarchically Decoupled Matching Network (HDMNet) mining pixel-level support correlation based on the transformer architecture. The self-attention modules are used to assist in establishing hierarchical dense features, as a means to accomplish the cascade matching between query and support f…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Knowledge distillation (KD) has recently emerged as a powerful strategy to transfer knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model to a lightweight student, and has demonstrated its unprecedented success over a wide spectrum of applications. In spite of the encouraging results, the KD process per se poses a potential threat to network ownership protection, since the knowledge contained in network can be effortlessly distilled and hence exposed to a malicious user. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, termed as Safe Distillation Box (SDB), that allows us to wrap a pre-trained model in a vir…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Few-shot learning models learn representations with limited human annotations, and such a learning paradigm demonstrates practicability in various tasks, e.g., image classification, object detection, etc. However, few-shot object detection methods suffer from an intrinsic defect that the limited training data makes the model cannot sufficiently explore semantic information. To tackle this, we introduce knowledge distillation to the few-shot object detection learning paradigm. We further run a motivating experiment, which demonstrates that in the process of knowledge distillation, the empirical…
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 …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Model compression has been widely adopted to obtain light-weighted deep neural networks. Most prevalent methods, however, require fine-tuning with sufficient training data to ensure accuracy, which could be challenged by privacy and security issues. As a compromise between privacy and performance, in this paper we investigate few shot network compression: given few samples per class, how can we effectively compress the network with negligible performance drop? The core challenge of few shot network compression lies in high estimation errors from the original network during inference, since the…
Concept-based explanations aims to fill the model interpretability gap for non-technical humans-in-the-loop. Previous work has focused on providing concepts for specific models (eg, neural networks) or data types (eg, images), and by either trying to extract concepts from an already trained network or training self-explainable models through multi-task learning. In this work, we propose ConceptDistil, a method to bring concept explanations to any black-box classifier using knowledge distillation. ConceptDistil is decomposed into two components:(1) a concept model that predicts which domain con…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）
Few-shot segmentation focuses on the generalization of models to segment unseen object with limited annotated samples. However, existing approaches still face two main challenges. First, huge feature distinction between support and query images causes knowledge transferring barrier, which harms the segmentation performance. Second, limited support prototypes cannot adequately represent features of support objects, hard to guide high-quality query segmentation. To deal with the above two issues, we propose self-distillation embedded supervised affinity attention model to improve the performance…
CD^2: Constrained Dataset Distillation for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络安全学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification for Bridging Semantic Gaps in Black-Box Domain Adaptation
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Tianjin University（天津大学人工智能学院）
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））
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Real-world contains an overwhelmingly large number of object classes, learning all of which at once is infeasible. Few shot learning is a promising learning paradigm due to its ability to learn out of order distributions quickly with only a few samples. Recent works [7, 41] show that simply learning a good feature embedding can outperform more sophisticated meta-learning and metric learning algorithms for few-shot learning. In this paper, we propose a simple approach to improve the representation capacity of deep neural networks for few-shot learning tasks. We follow a two-stage learning proce…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61-CSIRO Australia（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；North South University Bangladesh（孟加拉国南北大学）；Monash University Australia（澳大利亚莫纳什大学）
Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) portrays the problem of learning new concepts gradually, where only a few examples per concept are available to the learner. Due to the limited number of examples for training, the techniques developed for standard incremental learning cannot be applied verbatim to FSCIL. In this work, we introduce a distillation algorithm to address the problem of FSCIL and propose to make use of semantic information during training. To this end, we make use of word embeddings as semantic information which is cheap to obtain and which facilitate the distillation pro…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Neural architecture search (NAS) has made tremendous progress in the automatic design of effective neural network structures but suffers from a heavy computational burden. One-shot NAS significantly alleviates the burden through weight sharing and improves computational efficiency. Zero-shot NAS further reduces the cost by predicting the performance of the network from its initial state, which conducts no training. Both methods aim to distinguish between "good" and "bad" architectures, i.e., ranking consistency of predicted and true performance. In this paper, we propose Ranking Distillation o…
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common knowledge transfer algorithm used for model compression across a variety of deep learning based natural language processing (NLP) solutions. In its regular manifestations, KD requires access to the teacher's training data for knowledge transfer to the student network. However, privacy concerns, data regulations and proprietary reasons may prevent access to such data. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first work on Zero-Shot Knowledge Distillation for NLP, where the student learns from the much larger teacher without any task specific data. Ou…
Traditional computer vision models are trained to predict a fixed set of predefined categories. Recently, natural language has been shown to be a broader and richer source of supervision that provides finer descriptions to visual concepts than supervised "gold" labels. Previous works, such as CLIP, use a simple pretraining task of predicting the pairings between images and text captions. CLIP, however, is data hungry and requires more than 400M image text pairs for training. We propose a data-efficient contrastive distillation method that uses soft labels to learn from noisy image-text pairs. …
Mutually Causal Semantic Distillation Network for Zero-Shot Learning
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；National Anti-Counterfeit Engineering Research Center（国家防伪工程技术研究中心）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；MICC, University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学MICC）；Huawei Kirin Solution（华为麒麟解决方案）
Most meta-learning approaches assume the existence of a very large set of labeled data available for episodic meta-learning of base knowledge. This contrasts with the more realistic continual learning paradigm in which data arrives incrementally in the form of tasks containing disjoint classes. In this paper we consider this problem of Incremental Meta-Learning (IML) in which classes are presented incrementally in discrete tasks. We propose an approach to IML, which we call Episodic Replay Distillation (ERD), that mixes classes from the current task with class exemplars from previous tasks whe…
Vision-language models trained with contrastive learning on large-scale noisy data are becoming increasingly popular for zero-shot recognition problems. In this paper we improve the following three aspects of the contrastive pre-training pipeline: dataset noise, model initialization and the training objective. First, we propose a straightforward filtering strategy titled Complexity, Action, and Text-spotting (CAT) that significantly reduces dataset size, while achieving improved performance across zero-shot vision-language tasks. Next, we propose an approach titled Concept Distillation to leve…
Preference-driven Knowledge Distillation for Few-shot Node Classification
College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University, China（同济大学电子与信息学院）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, China（上海智能自主系统研究院）；National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China（人机混合增强智能国家级重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, China（同济大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, USA（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校计算机科学系）
Model Mimic Attack: Knowledge Distillation for Provably Transferable Adversarial Examples
Research Center for Trusted Artificial Intelligence（可信人工智能研究中心）；Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院伊万尼科夫系统编程研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (National Research University)（莫斯科物理技术学院（国立研究型大学））；AIRI（AIRI（人工智能研究所））
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai International Studies University（上海外国语大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Deep neural networks can capture the intricate interaction history information between queries and documents, because of their many complicated nonlinear units, allowing them to provide correct search recommendations. However, service providers frequently face more complex obstacles in real-world circumstances, such as deployment cost constraints and fairness requirements. Knowledge distillation, which transfers the knowledge of a well-trained complex model (teacher) to a simple model (student), has been proposed to alleviate the former concern, but the best current distillation methods focus …
IBM Research China（IBM中国研究院）；Department of Healthcare Policy and Research, Cornell University（康奈尔大学医疗政策与研究系）；IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
In real world applications like healthcare, it is usually difficult to build a machine learning prediction model that works universally well across different institutions. At the same time, the available model is often proprietary, i.e., neither the model parameter nor the data set used for model training is accessible. In consequence, leveraging the knowledge hidden in the available model (aka. the hypothesis) and adapting it to a local data set becomes extremely challenging. Motivated by this situation, in this paper we aim to address such a specific case within the hypothesis transfer learn…
Black-box Source-free Domain Adaptation via Two-stage Knowledge Distillation
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Most existing Human-Object Interaction~(HOI) Detection methods rely heavily on full annotations with predefined HOI categories, which is limited in diversity and costly to scale further. We aim at advancing zero-shot HOI detection to detect both seen and unseen HOIs simultaneously. The fundamental challenges are to discover potential human-object pairs and identify novel HOI categories. To overcome the above challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end zero-shot HOI Detection (EoID) framework via vision-language knowledge distillation. We first design an Interactive Score module combined with a T…
Prototypical Distillation and Debiased Tuning for Black-box Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学智能科学与技术学院）
Teacher-Guided One-Shot Pruning via Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation
Apurba-NSU R&D Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh（阿普尔巴-NSU研发实验室，电气与计算机工程系，北方南大学，达卡，孟加拉国）；Apurba Technologies, Sunnyvale, CA 94085, USA（阿普尔巴技术公司，硅谷，加利福尼亚州94085，美国）
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Most existing works in few-shot learning rely on meta-learning the network on a large base dataset which is typically from the same domain as the target dataset. We tackle the problem of cross-domain few-shot learning where there is a large shift between the base and target domain. The problem of cross-domain few-shot recognition with unlabeled target data is largely unaddressed in the literature. STARTUP was the first method that tackles this problem using self-training. However, it uses a fixed teacher pretrained on a labeled base dataset to create soft labels for the unlabeled target sample…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
Given a model well-trained with a large-scale base dataset, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims at incrementally learning novel classes from a few labeled samples by avoiding overfitting, without catastrophically forgetting all encountered classes previously. Currently, semi-supervised learning technique that harnesses freely-available unlabeled data to compensate for limited labeled data can boost the performance in numerous vision tasks, which heuristically can be applied to tackle issues in FSCIL, i.e., the Semi-supervised FSCIL (Semi-FSCIL). So far, very limited work focuses o…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST)（华中科技大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute of North Electronic Equipment（北方电子设备研究所）
The key challenge of zero-shot learning (ZSL) is how to infer the latent semantic knowledge between visual and attribute features on seen classes, and thus achieving a desirable knowledge transfer to unseen classes. Prior works either simply align the global features of an image with its associated class semantic vector or utilize unidirectional attention to learn the limited latent semantic representations, which could not effectively discover the intrinsic semantic knowledge e.g., attribute semantics) between visual and attribute features. To solve the above dilemma, we propose a Mutually Se…
