This repository contains the official implementation of the following paper:

CrossKD: Cross-Head Knowledge Distillation for Dense Object Detection
Jiabao Wang^*, Yuming Chen^*, Zhaohui Zheng，Xiang Li, Ming-Ming Cheng, Qibin Hou^*
(* denotes equal contribution)
VCIP, School of Computer Science, Nankai University

[Arxiv Paper]

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been validated as an effective model compression technique for learning compact object detectors. Existing state-of-the-art KD methods for object detection are mostly based on feature imitation, which is generally observed to be better than prediction mimicking. In this paper, we show that the inconsistency of the optimization objectives between the ground-truth signals and distillation targets is the key reason for the inefficiency of prediction mimicking. To alleviate this issue, we present a simple yet effective distillation scheme, termed CrossKD, which delivers the intermediate features of the student's detection head to the teacher's detection head. The resulting cross-head predictions are then forced to mimic the teacher's predictions. Such a distillation manner relieves the student's head from receiving contradictory supervision signals from the ground-truth annotations and the teacher's predictions, greatly improving the student's detection performance. On MS COCO, with only prediction mimicking losses applied, our CrossKD boosts the average precision of GFL ResNet-50 with 1x training schedule from 40.2 to 43.7, outperforming all existing KD methods for object detection.

Dependencies

• Ubuntu >= 20.04
• CUDA >= 11.3
• pytorch==1.12.1
• torchvision=0.13.1
• mmcv==2.0.0rc4
• mmengine==0.7.3

Our implementation based on MMDetection==3.0.0rc6. For more information about installation, please see the official instructions.

Step 0. Create Conda Environment

conda create --name openmmlab python=3.8 -y
conda activate openmmlab

Step 1. Install Pytorch

conda install pytorch==1.12.1 torchvision==0.13.1 torchaudio==0.12.1 cudatoolkit=11.3 -c pytorch

Step 2. Install MMEngine and MMCV using MIM.

pip install -U openmim
mim install "mmengine==0.7.3"
mim install "mmcv==2.0.0rc4"

Step 3. Install CrossKD.

git clone https://github.com/jbwang1997/CrossKD
cd CrossKD
pip install -v -e .
# "-v" means verbose, or more output
# "-e" means installing a project in editable mode,
# thus any local modifications made to the code will take effect without reinstallation.

Step 4. Prepare dataset follow the official instructions.

Single GPU

python tools/train.py configs/crosskd/${CONFIG_FILE} [optional arguments]

Multi GPU

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=x,x,x,x python tools/dist_train.sh \
    configs/crosskd/${CONFIG_FILE} ${GPU_NUM} [optional arguments]

python tools/test.py configs/crosskd/${CONFIG_FILE} ${CHECKPOINT_FILE}

If you find our repo useful for your research, please cite us:

@misc{wang2023crosskd,
      title={CrossKD: Cross-Head Knowledge Distillation for Dense Object Detection}, 
      author={Jiabao Wang and Yuming Chen and Zhaohui Zheng and Xiang Li and 
              Ming-Ming Cheng and Qibin Hou},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2306.11369},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV}
}

This project is based on the open source codebase MMDetection.

@article{mmdetection,
  title   = {{MMDetection}: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark},
  author  = {Chen, Kai and Wang, Jiaqi and Pang, Jiangmiao and Cao, Yuhang and
             Xiong, Yu and Li, Xiaoxiao and Sun, Shuyang and Feng, Wansen and
             Liu, Ziwei and Xu, Jiarui and Zhang, Zheng and Cheng, Dazhi and
             Zhu, Chenchen and Cheng, Tianheng and Zhao, Qijie and Li, Buyu and
             Lu, Xin and Zhu, Rui and Wu, Yue and Dai, Jifeng and Wang, Jingdong
             and Shi, Jianping and Ouyang, Wanli and Loy, Chen Change and Lin, Dahua},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.07155},
  year={2019}
}

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International for Non-commercial use only. Any commercial use should get formal permission first.

For technical questions, please contact [email protected] and [email protected].

This repo is modified from open source object detection codebase MMDetection.