Sketch Down the FLOPs: Towards Efficient Networks for Human Sketch

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sain, Aneeshan, Maity, Subhajit, Chowdhury, Pinaki Nath, Koley, Subhadeep, Bhunia, Ayan Kumar, Song, Yi-Zhe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sain, Aneeshan
Maity, Subhajit
Chowdhury, Pinaki Nath
Koley, Subhadeep
Bhunia, Ayan Kumar
Song, Yi-Zhe
author_facet Sain, Aneeshan
Maity, Subhajit
Chowdhury, Pinaki Nath
Koley, Subhadeep
Bhunia, Ayan Kumar
Song, Yi-Zhe
contents As sketch research has collectively matured over time, its adaptation for at-mass commercialisation emerges on the immediate horizon. Despite an already mature research endeavour for photos, there is no research on the efficient inference specifically designed for sketch data. In this paper, we first demonstrate existing state-of-the-art efficient light-weight models designed for photos do not work on sketches. We then propose two sketch-specific components which work in a plug-n-play manner on any photo efficient network to adapt them to work on sketch data. We specifically chose fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) as a demonstrator as the most recognised sketch problem with immediate commercial value. Technically speaking, we first propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation network to transfer existing photo efficient networks to be compatible with sketch, which brings down number of FLOPs and model parameters by 97.96% percent and 84.89% respectively. We then exploit the abstract trait of sketch to introduce a RL-based canvas selector that dynamically adjusts to the abstraction level which further cuts down number of FLOPs by two thirds. The end result is an overall reduction of 99.37% of FLOPs (from 40.18G to 0.254G) when compared with a full network, while retaining the accuracy (33.03% vs 32.77%) -- finally making an efficient network for the sparse sketch data that exhibit even fewer FLOPs than the best photo counterpart.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23763
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sketch Down the FLOPs: Towards Efficient Networks for Human Sketch
Sain, Aneeshan
Maity, Subhajit
Chowdhury, Pinaki Nath
Koley, Subhadeep
Bhunia, Ayan Kumar
Song, Yi-Zhe
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
As sketch research has collectively matured over time, its adaptation for at-mass commercialisation emerges on the immediate horizon. Despite an already mature research endeavour for photos, there is no research on the efficient inference specifically designed for sketch data. In this paper, we first demonstrate existing state-of-the-art efficient light-weight models designed for photos do not work on sketches. We then propose two sketch-specific components which work in a plug-n-play manner on any photo efficient network to adapt them to work on sketch data. We specifically chose fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) as a demonstrator as the most recognised sketch problem with immediate commercial value. Technically speaking, we first propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation network to transfer existing photo efficient networks to be compatible with sketch, which brings down number of FLOPs and model parameters by 97.96% percent and 84.89% respectively. We then exploit the abstract trait of sketch to introduce a RL-based canvas selector that dynamically adjusts to the abstraction level which further cuts down number of FLOPs by two thirds. The end result is an overall reduction of 99.37% of FLOPs (from 40.18G to 0.254G) when compared with a full network, while retaining the accuracy (33.03% vs 32.77%) -- finally making an efficient network for the sparse sketch data that exhibit even fewer FLOPs than the best photo counterpart.
title Sketch Down the FLOPs: Towards Efficient Networks for Human Sketch
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23763