Structured Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction

In this paper, we consider transferring the structure information from large networks to small ones for dense prediction tasks. Previous knowledge distillation strategies used for dense prediction tasks often directly borrow the distillation scheme for image classification and perform knowledge distillation for each pixel separately, leading to sub-optimal performance. Here we propose to distill structured knowledge from large networks to small networks, taking into account the fact that dense prediction is a structured prediction problem. Specifically, we study two structured distillation schemes: i)pair-wise distillation that distills the pairwise similarities by building a static graph, and ii)holistic distillation that uses adversarial training to distill holistic knowledge. The effectiveness of our knowledge distillation approaches is demonstrated by extensive experiments on three dense prediction tasks: semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and object detection.