Deep neural networks based methods have been proved to achieve outstanding performance on object detection and classification tasks. Despite significant performance improvement, due to the deep structures, they still require prohibitive runtime to process images and maintain the highest possible performance for real-time applications. Observing the phenomenon that human vision system (HVS) relies heavily on the temporal dependencies among frames from the visual input to conduct recognition efficiently, we propose a novel framework dubbed as TKD: temporal knowledge distillation. This framework distills the temporal knowledge from a heavy neural networks based model over selected video frames (the perception of the moments) to a light-weight model. To enable the distillation, we put forward two novel procedures: 1) an Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) based key frame selection method; and 2) a novel teacher-bounded loss design. To validate, we conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations using different object detection methods over multiple datasets including Youtube-Objects and Hollywood scene dataset. Our results show consistent improvement in accuracy-speed trad-offs for object detection over the frames of the dynamic scene, compare to other modern object recognition methods.
While depth tends to improve network performances, it also makes gradient-based training more difficult since deeper networks tend to be more non-linear. The recently proposed knowledge distillation approach is aimed at obtaining small and fast-to-execute models, and it has shown that a student network could imitate the soft output of a larger teacher network or ensemble of networks. In this paper, we extend this idea to allow the training of a student that is deeper and thinner than the teacher, using not only the outputs but also the intermediate representations learned by the teacher as hints to improve the training process and final performance of the student. Because the student intermediate hidden layer will generally be smaller than the teacher's intermediate hidden layer, additional parameters are introduced to map the student hidden layer to the prediction of the teacher hidden layer. This allows one to train deeper students that can generalize better or run faster, a trade-off that is controlled by the chosen student capacity. For example, on CIFAR-10, a deep student network with almost 10.4 times less parameters outperforms a larger, state-of-the-art teacher network. Model compression and knowledge distillation have been successfully applied for cross-architecture and cross-domain transfer learning. However, a key requirement is that training examples are in correspondence across the domains. We show that in many scenarios of practical importance such aligned data can be synthetically generated using computer graphics pipelines allowing domain adaptation through distillation. We apply this technique to learn models for recognizing low-resolution images using labeled high-resolution images, non-localized objects using labeled localized objects, line-drawings using labeled color images, etc. Experiments on various fine-grained recognition datasets demonstrate that the technique improves recognition performance on the low-quality data and beats strong baselines for domain adaptation. Finally, we present insights into workings of the technique through visualizations and relating it to existing literature. In this work we propose a technique that transfers supervision between images from different modalities. We use learned representations from a large labeled modality as supervisory signal for training representations for a new unlabeled paired modality. Our method enables learning of rich representations for unlabeled modalities and can be used as a pre-training procedure for new modalities with limited labeled data. We transfer supervision from labeled RGB images to unlabeled depth and optical flow images and demonstrate large improvements for both these cross modal supervision transfers. A very simple way to improve the performance of almost any machine learning algorithm is to train many different models on the same data and then to average their predictions. Unfortunately, making predictions using a whole ensemble of models is cumbersome and may be too computationally expensive to allow deployment to a large number of users, especially if the individual models are large neural nets. Caruana and his collaborators have shown that it is possible to compress the knowledge in an ensemble into a single model which is much easier to deploy and we develop this approach further using a different compression technique. We achieve some surprising results on MNIST and we show that we can significantly improve the acoustic model of a heavily used commercial system by distilling the knowledge in an ensemble of models into a single model. We also introduce a new type of ensemble composed of one or more full models and many specialist models which learn to distinguish fine-grained classes that the full models confuse. Unlike a mixture of experts, these specialist models can be trained rapidly and in parallel.