CanKD: Cross-Attention-based Non-local operation for Feature-based Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sun, Shizhe, Ohyama, Wataru
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sun, Shizhe
Ohyama, Wataru
author_facet Sun, Shizhe
Ohyama, Wataru
contents We propose Cross-Attention-based Non-local Knowledge Distillation (CanKD), a novel feature-based knowledge distillation framework that leverages cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the knowledge transfer process. Unlike traditional self-attention-based distillation methods that align teacher and student feature maps independently, CanKD enables each pixel in the student feature map to dynamically consider all pixels in the teacher feature map. This non-local knowledge transfer more thoroughly captures pixel-wise relationships, improving feature representation learning. Our method introduces only an additional loss function to achieve superior performance compared with existing attention-guided distillation methods. Extensive experiments on object detection and image segmentation tasks demonstrate that CanKD outperforms state-of-the-art feature and hybrid distillation methods. These experimental results highlight CanKD's potential as a new paradigm for attention-guided distillation in computer vision tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/tori-hotaru/CanKD
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21503
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CanKD: Cross-Attention-based Non-local operation for Feature-based Knowledge Distillation
Sun, Shizhe
Ohyama, Wataru
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We propose Cross-Attention-based Non-local Knowledge Distillation (CanKD), a novel feature-based knowledge distillation framework that leverages cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the knowledge transfer process. Unlike traditional self-attention-based distillation methods that align teacher and student feature maps independently, CanKD enables each pixel in the student feature map to dynamically consider all pixels in the teacher feature map. This non-local knowledge transfer more thoroughly captures pixel-wise relationships, improving feature representation learning. Our method introduces only an additional loss function to achieve superior performance compared with existing attention-guided distillation methods. Extensive experiments on object detection and image segmentation tasks demonstrate that CanKD outperforms state-of-the-art feature and hybrid distillation methods. These experimental results highlight CanKD's potential as a new paradigm for attention-guided distillation in computer vision tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/tori-hotaru/CanKD
title CanKD: Cross-Attention-based Non-local operation for Feature-based Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21503