Masked image modeling (MIM) methods typically operate in either raw pixel space (reconstructing masked patches) or latent feature space (aligning with a pre-trained teacher). We present MEDiC (Multi-objective Exploration of Distillation from CLIP), a framework that combines both spaces in a single pipeline through three complementary objectives: patch-level token distillation from a frozen CLIP encoder, global CLS alignment, and pixel reconstruction via a lightweight decoder. We conduct a systematic investigation of the design space surrounding this multi-objective framework. First, we show that all three objectives provide complementary information, with the full combination reaching 73.9% kNN accuracy on ImageNet-1K. Second, we introduce hierarchical clustering with relative position bias for evolved masking and find that, despite producing more semantically coherent masks than prior methods, evolved masking does not outperform simple block masking in the teacher-guided distillation setting, a finding we attribute to the teacher's inherent semantic awareness. Third, we reveal that optimal scalar loss weights are extremely fragile, with small perturbations causing drops of up to 17 percentage points in kNN accuracy. Our framework achieves 73.9% kNN and 85.1% fine-tuning accuracy with ViT-Base at 300 epochs.
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. …
Unifying Biomedical Vision-Language Expertise: Towards a Generalist Foundation Model via Multi-CLIP Knowledge Distillation
Department of Radiation Oncology, Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University School of Medicine（放射肿瘤科，Winship癌症研究所，埃默里大学医学院）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（生物医学工程系，工程学院，佐治亚理工学院）；Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Laney Graduate School, Emory University（计算机科学与数学系，兰尼研究生院，埃默里大学）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（电气与计算机工程系，工程学院，佐治亚理工学院）
Progressive trajectory matching for medical dataset distillation
National Institute of Health Data Science, Peking University（北京大学健康数据科学研究院）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机技术研究院）
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
The amount of medical images for training deep classification models is typically very scarce, making these deep models prone to overfit the training data. Studies showed that knowledge distillation (KD), especially the mean-teacher framework which is more robust to perturbations, can help mitigate the over-fitting effect. However, directly transferring KD from computer vision to medical image classification yields inferior performance as medical images suffer from higher intra-class variance and class imbalance. To address these issues, we propose a novel Categorical Relation-preserving Contr…
A Progressive Framework of Vision-language Knowledge Distillation and Alignment for Multilingual Scene
School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学地理与信息工程学院）；Meituan（美团）；National Engineering Research Center for Geographic Information System, China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学国家地理信息系统工程技术研究中心）
Multi-Dataset Cross-Domain Knowledge Distillation for Unified Medical Image Segmentation, Classification, and Detection
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Gheorghe Mihoc-Caius Iacob Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Applied Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院格奥尔基·米霍茨-凯奥斯·伊阿科夫学院数学统计与应用数学研究所）
Displacement Preserving Relational Distillation for Robust Medical Segmentation
Bowling Green State University（鲍灵格林州立大学）；The University of Findlay（芬德利大学）；University of Alabama at Birmingham（阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Houston - Clear Lake（休斯顿大学清水湖分校）；UTHealth Houston（德克萨斯大学健康科学中心休斯顿分校）
ReCo-KD: Region- and Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation
McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston)（麦威廉生物医学信息学学院，德克萨斯大学健康科学中心休斯顿分校（UTHealth休斯顿））
Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation from the Vision Foundation Model for Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation
Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Amazon Prime Video（亚马逊Prime Video）
The learning objective of vision-language approach of CLIP does not effectively account for the noisy many-to-many correspondences found in web-harvested image captioning datasets, which contributes to its compute and data inefficiency. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel training framework based on cross-modal contrastive learning that uses progressive self-distillation and soft image-text alignments to more efficiently learn robust representations from noisy data. Our model distills its own knowledge to dynamically generate soft-alignment targets for a subset of images and captio…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
The recent large-scale vision-language pre-training (VLP) of dual-stream architectures (e.g., CLIP) with a tremendous amount of image-text pair data, has shown its superiority on various multimodal alignment tasks. Despite its success, the resulting models are not capable of multimodal generative tasks due to the weak text encoder. To tackle this problem, we propose to augment the dual-stream VLP model with a textual pre-trained language model (PLM) via vision-language knowledge distillation (VLKD), enabling the capability for multimodal generation. VLKD is pretty data- and computation-efficie…
Uncertainty-Aware Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Ensemble Distillation
University of Ibadan（伊巴迪安大学）；African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Hertie Institute for Brain Health（海德研究所）
Sharing medical datasets between hospitals is challenging because of the privacy-protection problem and the massive cost of transmitting and storing many high-resolution medical images. However, dataset distillation can synthesize a small dataset such that models trained on it achieve comparable performance with the original large dataset, which shows potential for solving the existing medical sharing problems. Hence, this paper proposes a novel dataset distillation-based method for medical dataset sharing. Experimental results on a COVID-19 chest X-ray image dataset show that our method can a…
The University of Tokyo Hospital（东京大学医院）；Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo（东京大学医学院）；Junpukai Health Maintenance Center（顺会健康体检中心）；Hokkaido University（北海道大学）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；West China Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院）
The success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in 3D medical image segmentation relies on massive fully annotated 3D volumes for training that are time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose to annotate a segmentation target with only seven points in 3D medical images, and design a two-stage weakly supervised learning framework PA-Seg. In the first stage, we employ geodesic distance transform to expand the seed points to provide more supervision signal. To further deal with unannotated image regions during training, we propose two contextual regularization str…
PAII Inc.（PAII公司）；Chang Gung Memorial Hospital（长庚纪念医院）；Ping An Technology（平安科技）
Exploiting available medical records to train high performance computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) models via the semi-supervised learning (SSL) setting is emerging to tackle the prohibitively high labor costs involved in large-scale medical image annotations. Despite the extensive attentions received on SSL, previous methods failed to 1) account for the low disease prevalence in medical records and 2) utilize the image-level diagnosis indicated from the medical records. Both issues are unique to SSL for CAD models. In this work, we propose a new knowledge distillation method that effectively explo…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；The Fourth Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第四医院）
Recent advances have been made in applying convolutional neural networks to achieve more precise prediction results for medical image segmentation problems. However, the success of existing methods has highly relied on huge computational complexity and massive storage, which is impractical in the real-world scenario. To deal with this problem, we propose an efficient architecture by distilling knowledge from well-trained medical image segmentation networks to train another lightweight network. This architecture empowers the lightweight network to get a significant improvement on segmentation c…
Shape-intensity knowledge distillation for robust medical image segmentation
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（国家多媒体软件工程技术研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Multimedia and Network Communication Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学多媒体与网络通信工程湖北省重点实验室）；Medical Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of Renmin Hospital, Wuhan University（武汉大学人民医院医学人工智能研究院）
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Weill Cornell Medicine（威尔康奈尔医学院）
AI-powered Medical Imaging has recently achieved enormous attention due to its ability to provide fast-paced healthcare diagnoses. However, it usually suffers from a lack of high-quality datasets due to high annotation cost, inter-observer variability, human annotator error, and errors in computer-generated labels. Deep learning models trained on noisy labelled datasets are sensitive to the noise type and lead to less generalization on the unseen samples. To address this challenge, we propose a Robust Stochastic Knowledge Distillation (RoS-KD) framework which mimics the notion of learning a to…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）；Nankai University（南开大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Due to the constraints of the imaging device and high cost in operation time, computer tomography (CT) scans are usually acquired with low intra-slice resolution. Improving the intra-slice resolution is beneficial to the disease diagnosis for both human experts and computer-aided systems. To this end, this paper builds a novel medical slice synthesis to increase the between-slice resolution. Considering that the ground-truth intermediate medical slices are always absent in clinical practice, we introduce the incremental cross-view mutual distillation strategy to accomplish this task in the sel…
A New One-Shot Federated Learning Framework for Medical Imaging Classification with Feature-Guided Rectified Flow and Knowledge Distillation
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Ultra High Definition Immersive Media Technology（广东超高清沉浸媒体技术省重点实验室）；Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University（北京大学深圳研究生院）
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）
3D Feature Distillation with Object-Centric Priors
Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Groningen, the Neteherlands（格罗宁根大学人工智能系）；School of Informatics University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；Department of Computer Science University College London, United Kingdom（伦敦大学学院计算机科学系）
