Knowledge Distillation with Adversarial Samples Supporting Decision Boundary

Many recent works on knowledge distillation have provided ways to transfer the knowledge of a trained network for improving the learning process of a new one, but finding a good technique for knowledge distillation is still an open problem. In this paper, we provide a new perspective based on a decision boundary, which is one of the most important component of a classifier. The generalization performance of a classifier is closely related to the adequacy of its decision boundary, so a good classifier bears a good decision boundary. Therefore, transferring information closely related to the decision boundary can be a good attempt for knowledge distillation. To realize this goal, we utilize an adversarial attack to discover samples supporting a decision boundary. Based on this idea, to transfer more accurate information about the decision boundary, the proposed algorithm trains a student classifier based on the adversarial samples supporting the decision boundary. Experiments show that the proposed method indeed improves knowledge distillation and achieves the state-of-the-arts performance.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons

An activation boundary for a neuron refers to a separating hyperplane that determines whether the neuron is activated or deactivated. It has been long considered in neural networks that the activations of neurons, rather than their exact output values, play the most important role in forming classification friendly partitions of the hidden feature space. However, as far as we know, this aspect of neural networks has not been considered in the literature of knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a knowledge transfer method via distillation of activation boundaries formed by hidden neurons. For the distillation, we propose an activation transfer loss that has the minimum value when the boundaries generated by the student coincide with those by the teacher. Since the activation transfer loss is not differentiable, we design a piecewise differentiable loss approximating the activation transfer loss. By the proposed method, the student learns a separating boundary between activation region and deactivation region formed by each neuron in the teacher. Through the experiments in various aspects of knowledge transfer, it is verified that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

Backbone Can Not be Trained at Once: Rolling Back to Pre-trained Network for Person Re-Identification

In person re-identification (ReID) task, because of its shortage of trainable dataset, it is common to utilize fine-tuning method using a classification network pre-trained on a large dataset. However, it is relatively difficult to sufficiently fine-tune the low-level layers of the network due to the gradient vanishing problem. In this work, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy that allows low-level layers to be sufficiently trained by rolling back the weights of high-level layers to their initial pre-trained weights. Our strategy alleviates the problem of gradient vanishing in low-level layers and robustly trains the low-level layers to fit the ReID dataset, thereby increasing the performance of ReID tasks. The improved performance of the proposed strategy is validated via several experiments. Furthermore, without any add-ons such as pose estimation or segmentation, our strategy exhibits state-of-the-art performance using only vanilla deep convolutional neural network architecture.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

SeiT: Storage-Efficient Vision Training with Tokens Using 1% of Pixel Storage

We need billion-scale images to achieve more generalizable and ground-breaking vision models, as well as massive dataset storage to ship the images (e.g., the LAION-4B dataset needs 240TB storage space). However, it has become challenging to deal with unlimited dataset storage with limited storage infrastructure. A number of storage-efficient training methods have been proposed to tackle the problem, but they are rarely scalable or suffer from severe damage to performance. In this paper, we propose a storage-efficient training strategy for vision classifiers for large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet) that only uses 1024 tokens per instance without using the raw level pixels; our token storage only needs <1% of the original JPEG-compressed raw pixels. We also propose token augmentations and a Stem-adaptor module to make our approach able to use the same architecture as pixel-based approaches with only minimal modifications on the stem layer and the carefully tuned optimization settings. Our experimental results on ImageNet-1k show that our method significantly outperforms other storage-efficient training methods with a large gap. We further show the effectiveness of our method in other practical scenarios, storage-efficient pre-training, and continual learning. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/seitComment: ICCV 2023; First two authors contributed equally; code url: https://github.com/naver-ai/seit; 17 pages, 1.2M

Match me if you can: Semantic Correspondence Learning with Unpaired Images

Recent approaches for semantic correspondence have focused on obtaining high-quality correspondences using a complicated network, refining the ambiguous or noisy matching points. Despite their performance improvements, they remain constrained by the limited training pairs due to costly point-level annotations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective method that performs training with unlabeled pairs to complement both limited image pairs and sparse point pairs, requiring neither extra labeled keypoints nor trainable modules. We fundamentally extend the data quantity and variety by augmenting new unannotated pairs not primitively provided as training pairs in benchmarks. Using a simple teacher-student framework, we offer reliable pseudo correspondences to the student network via machine supervision. Finally, the performance of our network is steadily improved by the proposed iterative training, putting back the student as a teacher to generate refined labels and train a new student repeatedly. Our models outperform the milestone baselines, including state-of-the-art methods on semantic correspondence benchmarks.Comment: 12 page