The official code for paper: "Pixel Distillation: Cost-flexible Distillation across Image Sizes and Heterogeneous Networks", TPAMI 2024.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Pixel Distillation is a cost flexible distillation framework, adept at accommodating diverse image sizes and heterogeneous network architectures, thereby enabling adaptive and efficient cost reduction across varied settings.

News

The pixel distillation paradigm is also applied into Whole Slide Images Glomerulus Detection for reducing scanner equipment cost. Paper MHKD: Multi-step Hybrid Knowledge Distillation for Low-resolution Whole Slide Images Glomerulus Detection is accepted by IEEE EMBS BHI 2024 Conference.

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2. Training

# List of packages
python=3.9
pytorch=1.12.1
torchvision=0.13.1
timm=0.6.5
tensorboard=2.17.0
pillow=10.2.0
pyyaml=6.0.1
scikit-learn=1.5.1

2.1. Baseline (Teacher/Student)

Teacher networks are trained only once with fixed seed 0. For example, to train ResNet50 teacher network on CUB dataset

python tools_0_base/train_teacher_1run.py --config_file configs/base/cub/cub_resnet_single_224.yaml BASIC.SEED 0 BASIC.GPU_ID [0]

Student networks are trained 5 times. For example, to train ViT-tiny with 56 size student network on CUB dataset

python tools_0_base/train_student_5runs.py --config_file configs/base/cub/cub_vit_single_56.yaml MODEL.ARCH vit_tiny_patch16_56 BASIC.GPU_ID [0]

Note that for ViT models, changing input resolution needs to change the definition of in lib/models/vit.py

All available models can be found in lib/models/model_builder.py

2.2. One-stage Pixel Distillation (Teacher-Student)

Previous KD method

KD methods are trained 5 times. For example, using AT to train resnet50-teacher and resnet18-student with 56 size (LESSEN_RATIO=224/56=4.0) student network on CUB dataset

python tools_1_ts/train_kd_5runs.py --config_file configs/ts/cub/cub_resnet50_resnet_kd.yaml   MODEL.KDTYPE 'at' MODEL.ARCH_T 'resnet50' MODEL.MODELDICT_T 'ckpt/cub/1runs_resnet50_224_seed0_0.01/ckpt/model_best.pth' MODEL.ARCH_S 'resnet18' DATA.LESSEN_RATIO 4.0 BASIC.GPU_ID [0]

Our method

Our methods are trained 5 times. For example, to train resnet50-teacher and resnet18-student with 56 size student network on CUB dataset: LESSEN_RATIO=224/56=4.0, ETA=50

python tools_1_ts/train_isrd_5runs.py --config_file configs/ts/cub/cub_resnet50_resnet_isrd.yaml  MODEL.ARCH_T 'resnet50' MODEL.MODELDICT_T 'ckpt/cub/1runs_resnet50_224_seed0_0.01/ckpt/model_best.pth' MODEL.ARCH_S 'resnet18' DATA.LESSEN_RATIO 4.0 FSR.ETA 50.0 BASIC.GPU_ID [0]

Citation

@ARTICLE{guo2024pixel,
  author={Guo, Guangyu and Zhang, Dingwen and Han, Longfei and Liu, Nian and Cheng, Ming-Ming and Han, Junwei},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence}, 
  title={Pixel Distillation: Cost-flexible Distillation across Image Sizes and Heterogeneous Networks}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-15},
  doi={10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3421277}}

@inproceedings{
zhang2024mhkd,
title={{MHKD}: Multi-step Hybrid Knowledge Distillation for Low-resolution Whole Slide Images Glomerulus Detection},
author={Xiangsen Zhang and Longfei Han and Chenchu Xu and Zhaohui Zheng and Jin Ding and Xianghui Fu and Dingwen Zhang and Junwei Han},
booktitle={IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics},
year={2024},
}