Distilling Knowledge from Heterogeneous Architectures for Semantic Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Yanglin, Hu, Kai, Zhang, Yuan, Chen, Zhineng, Gao, Xieping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Yanglin
Hu, Kai
Zhang, Yuan
Chen, Zhineng
Gao, Xieping
author_facet Huang, Yanglin
Hu, Kai
Zhang, Yuan
Chen, Zhineng
Gao, Xieping
contents Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher's knowledge within homogeneous architectures. However, these methods overlook the diverse knowledge contained in architectures with different inductive biases, which is crucial for enabling the student to acquire a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the data during distillation. To this end, we propose for the first time a generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective, named HeteroAKD. Due to the substantial disparities between heterogeneous architectures, such as CNN and Transformer, directly transferring cross-architecture knowledge presents significant challenges. To eliminate the influence of architecture-specific information, the intermediate features of both the teacher and student are skillfully projected into an aligned logits space. Furthermore, to utilize diverse knowledge from heterogeneous architectures and deliver customized knowledge required by the student, a teacher-student knowledge mixing mechanism (KMM) and a teacher-student knowledge evaluation mechanism (KEM) are introduced. These mechanisms are performed by assessing the reliability and its discrepancy between heterogeneous teacher-student knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on three main-stream benchmarks using various teacher-student pairs demonstrate that our HeteroAKD outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_07691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distilling Knowledge from Heterogeneous Architectures for Semantic Segmentation
Huang, Yanglin
Hu, Kai
Zhang, Yuan
Chen, Zhineng
Gao, Xieping
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Current knowledge distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher's knowledge within homogeneous architectures. However, these methods overlook the diverse knowledge contained in architectures with different inductive biases, which is crucial for enabling the student to acquire a more precise and comprehensive understanding of the data during distillation. To this end, we propose for the first time a generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective, named HeteroAKD. Due to the substantial disparities between heterogeneous architectures, such as CNN and Transformer, directly transferring cross-architecture knowledge presents significant challenges. To eliminate the influence of architecture-specific information, the intermediate features of both the teacher and student are skillfully projected into an aligned logits space. Furthermore, to utilize diverse knowledge from heterogeneous architectures and deliver customized knowledge required by the student, a teacher-student knowledge mixing mechanism (KMM) and a teacher-student knowledge evaluation mechanism (KEM) are introduced. These mechanisms are performed by assessing the reliability and its discrepancy between heterogeneous teacher-student knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on three main-stream benchmarks using various teacher-student pairs demonstrate that our HeteroAKD outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.
title Distilling Knowledge from Heterogeneous Architectures for Semantic Segmentation
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07691