Knowledge Distillation via the Target-Aware Transformer

Sihao Lin, Hongwei Xie, Bing Wang, Kaicheng Yu, Xiaojun Chang, Xiaodan Liang, Gang Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 10915-10924

Abstract


Knowledge distillation becomes a de facto standard to improve the performance of small neural networks. Most of the previous works propose to regress the representational features from the teacher to the student in a one-to-one spatial matching fashion. However, people tend to overlook the fact that, due to the architecture differences, the semantic information on the same spatial location usually vary. This greatly undermines the underlying assumption of the one-to-one distillation approach. To this end, we propose a novel one-to-all spatial matching knowledge distillation approach. Specifically, we allow each pixel of the teacher feature to be distilled to all spatial locations of the student features given its similarity, which is generated from a target-aware transformer. Our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on various computer vision benchmarks, such as ImageNet, Pascal VOC and COCOStuff10k. Code is available at https://github.com/sihaoevery/TaT.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Lin_2022_CVPR, author = {Lin, Sihao and Xie, Hongwei and Wang, Bing and Yu, Kaicheng and Chang, Xiaojun and Liang, Xiaodan and Wang, Gang}, title = {Knowledge Distillation via the Target-Aware Transformer}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2022}, pages = {10915-10924} }