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 independent projection heads to simultaneously distill multiple teacher networks. We also find that using the same weakly augmented image as input for both teacher and student networks aids distillation. Experiments on ImageNet dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed changes in various self-supervised distillation settings.
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…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Toronto AI Lab（多伦多人工智能实验室）；LG Electronics Canada（LG电子加拿大公司）
Dataset distillation aims to learn a small synthetic dataset that preserves most of the information from the original dataset. Dataset distillation can be formulated as a bi-level meta-learning problem where the outer loop optimizes the meta-dataset and the inner loop trains a model on the distilled data. Meta-gradient computation is one of the key challenges in this formulation, as differentiating through the inner loop learning procedure introduces significant computation and memory costs. In this paper, we address these challenges using neural Feature Regression with Pooling (FRePo), achiev…
Deep regression trackers are among the fastest tracking algorithms available, and therefore suitable for real-time robotic applications. However, their accuracy is inadequate in many domains due to distribution shift and overfitting. In this paper we overcome such limitations by presenting the first methodology for domain adaption of such a class of trackers. To reduce the labeling effort we propose a weakly-supervised adaptation strategy, in which reinforcement learning is used to express weak supervision as a scalar application-dependent and temporally-delayed feedback. At the same time, kno…
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…
Biometrics Research Laboratories, NEC（日本电气公司生物识别研究实验室）；NEC Corporation（日本电气公司）
Compressing deep neural network (DNN) models becomes a very important and necessary technique for real-world applications, such as deploying those models on mobile devices. Knowledge distillation is one of the most popular methods for model compression, and many studies have been made on developing this technique. However, those studies mainly focused on classification problems, and very few attempts have been made on regression problems, although there are many application of DNNs on regression problems. In this paper, we propose a new formalism of knowledge distillation for regression proble…
GaitKD: A Universal Decoupled Distillation Framework for Efficient Gait Recognition
The City University of New York（纽约城市大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
In the field of planting fruit trees, pre-harvest estimation of fruit yield is important for fruit storage and price evaluation. However, considering the cost, the yield of each tree cannot be assessed by directly picking the immature fruit. Therefore, the problem is a very difficult task. In this paper, a fruit counting and yield assessment method based on computer vision is proposed for citrus fruit trees as an example. Firstly, images of single fruit trees from different angles are acquired and the number of fruits is detected using a deep Convolutional Neural Network model YOLOv5, and the …
Although recent deep learning-based calibration methods can predict extrinsic and intrinsic camera parameters from a single image, their generalization remains limited by the number and distribution of training data samples. The huge computational and space requirement prevents convolutional neural networks (CNNs) from being implemented in resource-constrained environments. This challenge motivated us to learn a CNN gradually, by training new data while maintaining performance on previously learned data. Our approach builds upon a CNN architecture to automatically estimate camera parameters (f…
Deep convolutional neural network with increased number of parameters has achieved improved precision in task of object detection on natural images, where objects of interests are annotated with horizontal boundary boxes. On aerial images captured from the bird-view perspective, these improvements on model architecture and deeper convolutional layers can also boost the performance on oriented object detection task. However, it is hard to directly apply those state-of-the-art object detectors on the devices with limited computation resources, which necessitates lightweight models through model …
Sichuan University（四川大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立情报学研究所）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
Unsupervised crowd counting is a challenging yet not largely explored task. In this paper, we explore it in a transfer learning setting where we learn to detect and count persons in an unlabeled target set by transferring bi-knowledge learnt from regression- and detection-based models in a labeled source set. The dual source knowledge of the two models is heterogeneous and complementary as they capture different modalities of the crowd distribution. We formulate the mutual transformations between the outputs of regression- and detection-based models as two scene-agnostic transformers which ena…
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…
Dense Depth Distillation with Out-of-Distribution Simulated Images
Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）；South China Normal University（华南师范大学）；METU（中东技术大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Decoupled Hierarchical Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
School of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Southeast University（计算机科学与工程学院，新一代人工智能技术及跨学科应用重点实验室，东南大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，南京理工大学）；Institute of Intelligent Information Processing, Taizhou University（智能信息处理研究院，台州大学）；School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（工程科学学院，中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（计算机科学与工程学院，南洋理工大学）
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）
Mainstream object detectors are commonly constituted of two sub-tasks, including classification and regression tasks, implemented by two parallel heads. This classic design paradigm inevitably leads to inconsistent spatial distributions between classification score and localization quality (IOU). Therefore, this paper alleviates this misalignment in the view of knowledge distillation. First, we observe that the massive teacher achieves a higher proportion of harmonious predictions than the lightweight student. Based on this intriguing observation, a novel Harmony Score (HS) is devised to estim…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We study on weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) which plays a vital role in relieving human involvement from object-level annotations. Predominant works integrate region proposal mechanisms with convolutional neural networks (CNN). Although CNN is proficient in extracting discriminative local features, grand challenges still exist to measure the likelihood of a bounding box containing a complete object (i.e., "objectness"). In this paper, we propose a novel WSOD framework with Objectness Distillation (i.e., WSOD^2) by designing a tailored training mechanism for weakly-supervised object d…
School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Age progression and regression aim to synthesize photorealistic appearance of a given face image with aging and rejuvenation effects, respectively. Existing generative adversarial networks (GANs) based methods suffer from the following three major issues: 1) unstable training introducing strong ghost artifacts in the generated faces, 2) unpaired training leading to unexpected changes in facial attributes such as genders and races, and 3) non-bijective age mappings increasing the uncertainty in the face transformation. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a novel framework, termed AgeF…
Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown a strong capacity to solve large-scale problems in many areas, such DNNs with voluminous parameters are hard to be deployed in a real-time system. To tackle this issue, Teacher-Student architectures were first utilized in knowledge distillation, where simple student networks can achieve comparable performance to deep teacher networks. Recently, Teacher-Student architectures have been effectively and widely embraced on various knowledge learning objectives, including knowledge distillation, knowledge expansion, knowledge adaption, and multi-task l…
Traditional object detectors are ill-equipped for incremental learning. However, fine-tuning directly on a well-trained detection model with only new data will lead to catastrophic forgetting. Knowledge distillation is a flexible way to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. In Incremental Object Detection (IOD), previous work mainly focuses on distilling for the combination of features and responses. However, they under-explore the information that contains in responses. In this paper, we propose a response-based incremental distillation method, dubbed Elastic Response Distillation (ERD), which fo…
CT-based Subchondral Bone Microstructural Analysis in Knee Osteoarthritis via MR-Guided Distillation Learning
School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）；Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属第九人民医院）
Recent improvements in convolutional neural network (CNN)-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods rely heavily on fabricating network architectures, rather than finding a suitable training algorithm other than simply minimizing the regression loss. Adapting knowledge distillation (KD) can open a way for bringing further improvement for SISR, and it is also beneficial in terms of model efficiency. KD is a model compression method that improves the performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) without using additional parameters for testing. It is getting the limelight recently for its c…
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 …
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Typically, the deployment of face recognition models in the wild needs to identify low-resolution faces with extremely low computational cost. To address this problem, a feasible solution is compressing a complex face model to achieve higher speed and lower memory at the cost of minimal performance drop. Inspired by that, this paper proposes a learning approach to recognize low-resolution faces via selective knowledge distillation. In this approach, a two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) is first initialized to recognize high-resolution faces and resolution-degraded faces with a teach…
Scale-invariant and View-relational Representation Learning for Full Surround Monocular Depth
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)（电子工程与计算机科学系，大邱庆北科学技术大学）；Department of Autonomous Driving Perception Technology Vanguard Team, Hyundai Motor Company（自动驾驶感知技术先锋团队，现代汽车公司）
Temporal Zoom Networks: Distance Regression and Continuous Depth for Efficient Action Localization
Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University（计算机科学系，爱荷华州立大学）；Department of Civil, Construction & Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University（土木、建设与环境工程系，爱荷华州立大学）
Knowledge distillation (KD) has been actively studied for image classification tasks in deep learning, aiming to improve the performance of a student based on the knowledge from a teacher. However, applying KD in image regression with a scalar response variable has been rarely studied, and there exists no KD method applicable to both classification and regression tasks yet. Moreover, existing KD methods often require a practitioner to carefully select or adjust the teacher and student architectures, making these methods less flexible in practice. To address the above problems in a unified way,…
LIX: Implicitly Infusing Spatial Geometric Prior Knowledge into Visual Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving
College of Electronics & Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基大学）；Shanghai Institute of Intelligent Science and Technology（上海智能科学技术研究院）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems（上海智能自主系统研究院）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Shenzhen Research Institute（香港科技大学深圳研究院）
Left-ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is an important indicator of heart failure. Existing methods for LVEF estimation from video require large amounts of annotated data to achieve high performance, e.g. using 10,030 labeled echocardiogram videos to achieve mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.10. Labeling these videos is time-consuming however and limits potential downstream applications to other heart diseases. This paper presents the first semi-supervised approach for LVEF prediction. Unlike general video prediction tasks, LVEF prediction is specifically related to changes in the left ventric…
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…
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆凯特琳癌症中心）
Vision transformers, with their ability to more efficiently model long-range context, have demonstrated impressive accuracy gains in several computer vision and medical image analysis tasks including segmentation. However, such methods need large labeled datasets for training, which is hard to obtain for medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated success in medical image segmentation using convolutional networks. In this work, we developed a \underline{s}elf-distillation learning with \underline{m}asked \underline{i}mage modeling method to perform SSL for vision \u…
