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 into the final NN with one RvC head. The KD improves the results by an average of 7.7\% compared to base NN. This feature makes it possible to use KD as a booster and effectively train deeper NNs. NNs trained by our KD method partially improved the state-of-the-art results. KD-ResNet152 has the best results, and KD-ResNet18 has a better result on the AFLW2000 dataset than any previous method.We have made publicly available trained NNs and face bounding boxes for the 300W-LP, AFLW, AFLW2000, and BIWI datasets.Our method potentially can be effective for other regression problems.
While self-supervised representation learning (SSL) has proved to be effective in the large model, there is still a huge gap between the SSL and supervised method in the lightweight model when following the same solution. We delve into this problem and find that the lightweight model is prone to collapse in semantic space when simply performing instance-wise contrast. To address this issue, we propose a relation-wise contrastive paradigm with Relation Knowledge Distillation (ReKD). We introduce a heterogeneous teacher to explicitly mine the semantic information and transferring a novel relatio…
Head generation with diverse identities is an important task in computer vision and computer graphics, widely used in multimedia applications. However, current full head generation methods require a large number of 3D scans or multi-view images to train the model, resulting in expensive data acquisition cost. To address this issue, we propose Head3D, a method to generate full 3D heads with limited multi-view images. Specifically, our approach first extracts facial priors represented by tri-planes learned in EG3D, a 3D-aware generative model, and then proposes feature distillation to deliver th…
Unleashing the Potential of Mamba: Boosting a LiDAR 3D Sparse Detector by Using Cross-Model Knowledge Distillation
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）
MapDistill: Boosting Efficient Camera-based HD Map Construction via Camera-LiDAR Fusion Model Distillation
Samsung R&D Institute China–Beijing（三星中国北京研发中心）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Representation knowledge distillation aims at transferring rich information from one model to another. Common approaches for representation distillation mainly focus on the direct minimization of distance metrics between the models' embedding vectors. Such direct methods may be limited in transferring high-order dependencies embedded in the representation vectors, or in handling the capacity gap between the teacher and student models. Moreover, in standard knowledge distillation, the teacher is trained without awareness of the student's characteristics and capacity. In this paper, we explore t…
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a transfer learning task which aims at training on an unlabeled target domain by leveraging a labeled source domain. Beyond the traditional scope of UDA with a single source domain and a single target domain, real-world perception systems face a variety of scenarios to handle, from varying lighting conditions to many cities around the world. In this context, UDAs with several domains increase the challenges with the addition of distribution shifts within the different target domains. This work focuses on a novel framework for learning UDA, continuous UDA…
C2E: Boosting Ego-Only 3D Object Detection via Multi-Teacher Contrastive Knowledge Distillation
Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing, Xiamen University（福建省城市智能感知与计算重点实验室，厦门大学）；Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University（多媒体可信感知与高效计算教育部重点实验室，厦门大学）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been one of the most popu-lar methods to learn a compact model. However, it still suffers from highdemand in time and computational resources caused by sequential train-ing pipeline. Furthermore, the soft targets from deeper models do notoften serve as good cues for the shallower models due to the gap of com-patibility. In this work, we consider these two problems at the same time.Specifically, we propose that better soft targets with higher compatibil-ity can be generated by using a label generator to fuse the feature mapsfrom deeper stages in a top-down manner…
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Multi-Label Image Classification (MLIC) approaches usually exploit label correlations to achieve good performance. However, emphasizing correlation like co-occurrence may overlook discriminative features of the target itself and lead to model overfitting, thus undermining the performance. In this study, we propose a generic framework named Parallel Self-Distillation (PSD) for boosting MLIC models. PSD decomposes the original MLIC task into several simpler MLIC sub-tasks via two elaborated complementary task decomposition strategies named Co-occurrence Graph Partition (CGP) and Dis-occurrence G…
UMSPU: Universal Multi-Size Phase Unwrapping via Mutual Self-Distillation and Adaptive Boosting Ensemble Segmenters
the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering（电子信息与电气工程学院）；the Institute of Marine Equipment（海洋装备研究院）；the Institute of Medical Robotics（医学机器人研究院）
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Binghamton University, State University of New York（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）
General Continual Learning (GCL) aims at learning from non independent and identically distributed stream data without catastrophic forgetting of the old tasks that don't rely on task boundaries during both training and testing stages. We reveal that the relation and feature deviations are crucial problems for catastrophic forgetting, in which relation deviation refers to the deficiency of the relationship among all classes in knowledge distillation, and feature deviation refers to indiscriminative feature representations. To this end, we propose a Complementary Calibration (CoCa) framework by…
Decentralized learning with private data is a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel distillation-based decentralized learning technique that allows multiple agents with private non-iid data to learn from each other, without having to share their data, weights or weight updates. Our approach is communication efficient, utilizes an unlabeled public dataset and uses multiple auxiliary heads for each client, greatly improving training efficiency in the case of heterogeneous data. This approach allows individual models to preserve and enhance performance on their private tasks whi…
Feature regression is a simple way to distill large neural network models to smaller ones. We show that with simple changes to the network architecture, regression can outperform more complex state-of-the-art approaches for knowledge distillation from self-supervised models. Surprisingly, the addition of a multi-layer perceptron head to the CNN backbone is beneficial even if used only during distillation and discarded in the downstream task. Deeper non-linear projections can thus be used to accurately mimic the teacher without changing inference architecture and time. Moreover, we utilize inde…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University（安徽医科大学第一附属医院）
With rising male infertility, sperm head morphology classification becomes critical for accurate and timely clinical diagnosis. Recent deep learning (DL) morphology analysis methods achieve promising benchmark results, but leave performance and robustness on the table by relying on limited and possibly noisy class labels. To address this, we introduce a new DL training framework that leverages anatomical and image priors from human sperm microscopy crops to extract useful features without additional labeling cost. Our core idea is to distill sperm head information with reliably-generated pseud…
Mutual gaze detection, i.e., predicting whether or not two people are looking at each other, plays an important role in understanding human interactions. In this work, we focus on the task of image-based mutual gaze detection, and propose a simple and effective approach to boost the performance by using an auxiliary 3D gaze estimation task during the training phase. We achieve the performance boost without additional labeling cost by training the 3D gaze estimation branch using pseudo 3D gaze labels deduced from mutual gaze labels. By sharing the head image encoder between the 3D gaze estimati…
Boosting Medical Vision-Language Pretraining via Momentum Self-Distillation under Limited Computing Resources
Faculty of Information Technology, University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（信息科技学院，科学大学，胡志明市，越南）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（越南国家大学，胡志明市，越南）
We introduce a simple yet effective distillation framework that is able to boost the vanilla ResNet-50 to 80%+ Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet without tricks. We construct such a framework through analyzing the problems in the existing classification system and simplify the base method ensemble knowledge distillation via discriminators by: (1) adopting the similarity loss and discriminator only on the final outputs and (2) using the average of softmax probabilities from all teacher ensembles as the stronger supervision. Intriguingly, three novel perspectives are presented for distillation: (1) weig…
Several methods of knowledge distillation have been developed for neural network compression. While they all use the KL divergence loss to align the soft outputs of the student model more closely with that of the teacher, the various methods differ in how the intermediate features of the student are encouraged to match those of the teacher. In this paper, we propose a simple-to-implement method using auxiliary classifiers at intermediate layers for matching features, which we refer to as multi-head knowledge distillation (MHKD). We add loss terms for training the student that measure the dissi…
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）
Synthetic Data Generation for Emotional Depth Faces: Optimizing Conditional DCGANs via Genetic Algorithms in the Latent Space and Stabilizing Training with Knowledge Distillation
Cyrus Intelligence Research Ltd（居鲁士智能研究有限公司）；Pars AI
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
Unlike the conventional Knowledge Distillation (KD), Self-KD allows a network to learn knowledge from itself without any guidance from extra networks. This paper proposes to perform Self-KD from image Mixture (MixSKD), which integrates these two techniques into a unified framework. MixSKD mutually distills feature maps and probability distributions between the random pair of original images and their mixup images in a meaningful way. Therefore, it guides the network to learn cross-image knowledge by modelling supervisory signals from mixup images. Moreover, we construct a self-teacher network …
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…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）；SmartMore（思谋科技）
In instance-level detection tasks (e.g., object detection), reducing input resolution is an easy option to improve runtime efficiency. However, this option traditionally hurts the detection performance much. This paper focuses on boosting the performance of low-resolution models by distilling knowledge from a high- or multi-resolution model. We first identify the challenge of applying knowledge distillation (KD) to teacher and student networks that act on different input resolutions. To tackle it, we explore the idea of spatially aligning feature maps between models of varying input resolution…
Boosting Cross-Domain Point Classification via Distilling Relational Priors from 2D Transformers
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学电子与信息工程学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
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）
Ajou University（亚洲大学）；Hyundai Motor Company（现代汽车公司）；Naver AI Lab（Naver人工智能实验室）
Point-cloud based 3D object detectors recently have achieved remarkable progress. However, most studies are limited to the development of network architectures for improving only their accuracy without consideration of the computational efficiency. In this paper, we first propose an autoencoder-style framework comprising channel-wise compression and decompression via interchange transfer-based knowledge distillation. To learn the map-view feature of a teacher network, the features from teacher and student networks are independently passed through the shared autoencoder; here, we use a compress…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Deep models trained on long-tailed datasets exhibit unsatisfactory performance on tail classes. Existing methods usually modify the classification loss to increase the learning focus on tail classes, which unexpectedly sacrifice the performance on head classes. In fact, this scheme leads to a contradiction between the two goals of long-tailed learning, i.e., learning generalizable representations and facilitating learning for tail classes. In this work, we explore knowledge distillation in long-tailed scenarios and propose a novel distillation framework, named Balanced Knowledge Distillation (…
School of Computing Sciences（计算科学学院）；University of East Anglia（东英吉利大学）
We propose SUB-Depth, a universal multi-task training framework for self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SDE). Depth models trained with SUB-Depth outperform the same models trained in a standard single-task SDE framework. By introducing an additional self-distillation task into a standard SDE training framework, SUB-Depth trains a depth network, not only to predict the depth map for an image reconstruction task, but also to distill knowledge from a trained teacher network with unlabelled data. To take advantage of this multi-task setting, we propose homoscedastic uncertainty formulatio…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Recently, the compression and deployment of powerful deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-limited edge devices to provide intelligent services have become attractive tasks. Although knowledge distillation (KD) is a feasible solution for compression, its requirement on the original dataset raises privacy concerns. In addition, it is common to integrate multiple pretrained models to achieve satisfactory performance. How to compress multiple models into a tiny model is challenging, especially when the original data are unavailable. To tackle this challenge, we propose a framework termed collab…
CUHK（香港中文大学）；Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering, CUHK（香港中文大学信兴高等工程研究所）；Max Planck Institute（马克斯·普朗克研究所）
This paper presents a new approach to boost a single-modality (LiDAR) 3D object detector by teaching it to simulate features and responses that follow a multi-modality (LiDAR-image) detector. The approach needs LiDAR-image data only when training the single-modality detector, and once well-trained, it only needs LiDAR data at inference. We design a novel framework to realize the approach: response distillation to focus on the crucial response samples and avoid the background samples; sparse-voxel distillation to learn voxel semantics and relations from the estimated crucial voxels; a fine-grai…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Shandong University（山东大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) methods for object detection mainly concentrate on homogeneous teacher-student detectors. However, the design of a lightweight detector for deployment is often significantly different from a high-capacity detector. Thus, we investigate KD among heterogeneous teacher-student pairs for a wide application. We observe that the core difficulty for heterogeneous KD (hetero-KD) is the significant semantic gap between the backbone features of heterogeneous detectors due to the different optimization manners. Conventional homogeneous KD (homo-KD) methods suffer …
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）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；FAIR, Meta AI（Meta人工智能基础研究实验室（FAIR））
Recent advances in egocentric video understanding models are promising, but their heavy computational expense is a barrier for many real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose EgoDistill, a distillation-based approach that learns to reconstruct heavy egocentric video clip features by combining the semantics from a sparse set of video frames with the head motion from lightweight IMU readings. We further devise a novel self-supervised training strategy for IMU feature learning. Our method leads to significant improvements in efficiency, requiring 200x fewer GFLOPs than equival…
