Zhulin An

Chuanguang Yang, Helong Zhou, Zhulin An et al.

Current Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation often guide the student to mimic the teacher's structured information generated from individual data samples. However, they ignore the global semantic relations among pixels across various images that are valuable for KD. This paper proposes a novel Cross-Image Relational KD (CIRKD), which focuses on transferring structured pixel-to-pixel and pixel-to-region relations among the whole images. The motivation is that a good teacher network could construct a well-structured feature space in terms of global pixel dependencies. CIRKD makes the student mimic better structured semantic relations from the teacher, thus improving the segmentation performance. Experimental results over Cityscapes, CamVid and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach against state-of-the-art distillation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/winycg/CIRKD.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Libo Huang et al.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become a promising language-supervised visual pre-training framework. This paper aims to distill small CLIP models supervised by a large teacher CLIP model. We propose several distillation strategies, including relation, feature, gradient and contrastive paradigms, to examine the effectiveness of CLIP-Knowledge Distillation (KD). We show that a simple feature mimicry with Mean Squared Error loss works surprisingly well. Moreover, interactive contrastive learning across teacher and student encoders is also effective in performance improvement. We explain that the success of CLIP-KD can be attributed to maximizing the feature similarity between teacher and student. The unified method is applied to distill several student models trained on CC3M+12M. CLIP-KD improves student CLIP models consistently over zero-shot ImageNet classification and cross-modal retrieval benchmarks. When using ViT-L/14 pretrained on Laion-400M as the teacher, CLIP-KD achieves 57.5\% and 55.4\% zero-shot top-1 ImageNet accuracy over ViT-B/16 and ResNet-50, surpassing the original CLIP without KD by 20.5\% and 20.1\% margins, respectively. Our code is released on https://github.com/winycg/CLIP-KD.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Helong Zhou et al.

The teacher-free online Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to train an ensemble of multiple student models collaboratively and distill knowledge from each other. Although existing online KD methods achieve desirable performance, they often focus on class probabilities as the core knowledge type, ignoring the valuable feature representational information. We present a Mutual Contrastive Learning (MCL) framework for online KD. The core idea of MCL is to perform mutual interaction and transfer of contrastive distributions among a cohort of networks in an online manner. Our MCL can aggregate cross-network embedding information and maximize the lower bound to the mutual information between two networks. This enables each network to learn extra contrastive knowledge from others, leading to better feature representations, thus improving the performance of visual recognition tasks. Beyond the final layer, we extend MCL to intermediate layers and perform an adaptive layer-matching mechanism trained by meta-optimization. Experiments on image classification and transfer learning to visual recognition tasks show that layer-wise MCL can lead to consistent performance gains against state-of-the-art online KD approaches. The superiority demonstrates that layer-wise MCL can guide the network to generate better feature representations. Our code is publicly avaliable at https://github.com/winycg/L-MCL.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Helong Zhou et al.

Unlike the conventional Knowledge Distillation (KD), Self-KD allows a network to learn knowledge from itself without any guidance from extra networks. This paper proposes to perform Self-KD from image Mixture (MixSKD), which integrates these two techniques into a unified framework. MixSKD mutually distills feature maps and probability distributions between the random pair of original images and their mixup images in a meaningful way. Therefore, it guides the network to learn cross-image knowledge by modelling supervisory signals from mixup images. Moreover, we construct a self-teacher network by aggregating multi-stage feature maps for providing soft labels to supervise the backbone classifier, further improving the efficacy of self-boosting. Experiments on image classification and transfer learning to object detection and semantic segmentation demonstrate that MixSKD outperforms other state-of-the-art Self-KD and data augmentation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/winycg/Self-KD-Lib.

Libo Huang, Yan Zeng, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to solve the neural networks' catastrophic forgetting problem, which refers to the fact that once the network updates on a new task, its performance on previously-learned tasks drops dramatically. Most successful CIL methods incrementally train a feature extractor with the aid of stored exemplars, or estimate the feature distribution with the stored prototypes. However, the stored exemplars would violate the data privacy concerns, while the stored prototypes might not reasonably be consistent with a proper feature distribution, hindering the exploration of real-world CIL applications. In this paper, we propose a method of \textit{e}mbedding distillation and \textit{Ta}sk-oriented \textit{g}eneration (\textit{eTag}) for CIL, which requires neither the exemplar nor the prototype. Instead, eTag achieves a data-free manner to train the neural networks incrementally. To prevent the feature extractor from forgetting, eTag distills the embeddings of the network's intermediate blocks. Additionally, eTag enables a generative network to produce suitable features, fitting the needs of the top incremental classifier. Experimental results confirmed that our proposed eTag considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-sub\footnote{Our code is available in the Supplementary Materials.

Yisong Fu, Fei Wang, Zezhi Shao et al.

Transformers have gained attention in atmospheric time series forecasting (ATSF) for their ability to capture global spatial-temporal correlations. However, their complex architectures lead to excessive parameter counts and extended training times, limiting their scalability to large-scale forecasting. In this paper, we revisit ATSF from a theoretical perspective of atmospheric dynamics and uncover a key insight: spatial-temporal position embedding (STPE) can inherently model spatial-temporal correlations even without attention mechanisms. Its effectiveness arises from the integration of geographical coordinates and temporal features, which are intrinsically linked to atmospheric dynamics. Based on this, we propose STELLA, a Spatial-Temporal knowledge Embedded Lightweight modeL for ASTF, utilizing only STPE and an MLP architecture in place of Transformer layers. With 10k parameters and one hour of training, STELLA achieves superior performance on five datasets compared to other advanced methods. The paper emphasizes the effectiveness of spatial-temporal knowledge integration over complex architectures, providing novel insights for ATSF. The code is available at https://github.com/GestaltCogTeam/STELLA.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu

Existing works often focus on reducing the architecture redundancy for accelerating image classification but ignore the spatial redundancy of the input image. This paper proposes an efficient image classification pipeline to solve this problem. We first pinpoint task-aware regions over the input image by a lightweight patch proposal network called AnchorNet. We then feed these localized semantic patches with much smaller spatial redundancy into a general classification network. Unlike the popular design of deep CNN, we aim to carefully design the Receptive Field of AnchorNet without intermediate convolutional paddings. This ensures the exact mapping from a high-level spatial location to the specific input image patch. The contribution of each patch is interpretable. Moreover, AnchorNet is compatible with any downstream architecture. Experimental results on ImageNet show that our method outperforms SOTA dynamic inference methods with fewer inference costs. Our code is available at https://github.com/winycg/AnchorNet.

Weilun Feng, Mingqiang Wu, Zhiliang Chen et al.

SAM3D enables scalable, open-world 3D reconstruction from complex scenes, yet its deployment is hindered by prohibitive inference latency. In this work, we conduct the \textbf{first systematic investigation} into its inference dynamics, revealing that generic acceleration strategies are brittle in this context. We demonstrate that these failures stem from neglecting the pipeline's inherent multi-level \textbf{heterogeneity}: the kinematic distinctiveness between shape and layout, the intrinsic sparsity of texture refinement, and the spectral variance across geometries. To address this, we present \textbf{Fast-SAM3D}, a training-free framework that dynamically aligns computation with instantaneous generation complexity. Our approach integrates three heterogeneity-aware mechanisms: (1) \textit{Modality-Aware Step Caching} to decouple structural evolution from sensitive layout updates; (2) \textit{Joint Spatiotemporal Token Carving} to concentrate refinement on high-entropy regions; and (3) \textit{Spectral-Aware Token Aggregation} to adapt decoding resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fast-SAM3D delivers up to \textbf{2.67$\times$} end-to-end speedup with negligible fidelity loss, establishing a new Pareto frontier for efficient single-view 3D generation. Our code is released in https://github.com/wlfeng0509/Fast-SAM3D.

Chuanguang Yang, Xinqiang Yu, Zhulin An et al.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance for artificial intelligence tasks. The success behind intelligent systems often relies on large-scale models with high computational complexity and storage costs. The over-parameterized networks are often easy to optimize and can achieve better performance. However, it is challenging to deploy them over resource-limited edge-devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to optimize a lightweight network from the perspective of over-parameterized training. The traditional offline KD transfers knowledge from a cumbersome teacher to a small and fast student network. When a sizeable pre-trained teacher network is unavailable, online KD can improve a group of models by collaborative or mutual learning. Without needing extra models, Self-KD boosts the network itself using attached auxiliary architectures. KD mainly involves knowledge extraction and distillation strategies these two aspects. Beyond KD schemes, various KD algorithms are widely used in practical applications, such as multi-teacher KD, cross-modal KD, attention-based KD, data-free KD and adversarial KD. This paper provides a comprehensive KD survey, including knowledge categories, distillation schemes and algorithms, as well as some empirical studies on performance comparison. Finally, we discuss the open challenges of existing KD works and prospect the future directions.

Mingqiang Wu, Weilun Feng, Zhefeng Zhang et al.

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable open-ended generation through local attention and KV caching. However, existing training-free long-video optimization methods mainly focus on stable extension under a single prompt, making them difficult to handle interactive scenarios involving prompt switching, old scene forgetting, and historical scene recall. We identify the core bottleneck as the functional entanglement of historical KV states: stable anchors and recent dynamics are handled by the same cache policy, leading to outdated background contamination, delayed response to new prompts, and loss of long-range memory. To address this issue, we propose Echo-Forcing, a training-free scene memory framework specifically designed for interactive long video generation with three core mechanisms: (1) Hierarchical Temporal Memory, which decouples stable anchors, compressed history, and recent windows under relative RoPE; (2) Scene Recall Frames, which compresses historical scenes into spatially structured KV representations to support long-term recall; and (3) Difference-aware Memory Decay, which adaptively forgets conflicting tokens according to the discrepancy between old and new scenes. Based on these designs, Echo-Forcing uniformly supports smooth transitions, hard cuts, and long-range scene recall under a bounded cache budget. Extensive evaluations on VBench-Long further demonstrate that Echo-Forcing achieves the best overall performance in both long-video generation and interactive video generation settings. Our code is released in https://github.com/mingqiangWu/Echo-Forcing

Zezhi Shao, Fei Wang, Tao Sun et al.

Traffic forecasting, which aims to predict traffic conditions based on historical observations, has been an enduring research topic and is widely recognized as an essential component of intelligent transportation. Recent proposals on Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks~(STGNNs) have made significant progress by combining sequential models with graph convolution networks. However, due to high complexity issues, STGNNs only focus on short-term traffic forecasting (e.g., 1-h ahead), while ignoring more practical long-term forecasting. In this paper, we make the first attempt to explore long-term traffic forecasting (e.g., 1-day ahead). To this end, we first reveal its unique challenges in exploiting multi-scale representations. Then, we propose a novel Hierarchical U-Net TransFormer~(HUTFormer) to address the issues of long-term traffic forecasting. HUTFormer consists of a hierarchical encoder and decoder to jointly generate and utilize multi-scale representations of traffic data. Specifically, for the encoder, we {\color{black}propose} window self-attention and segment merging to extract multi-scale representations from long-term traffic data. For the decoder, we design a cross-scale attention mechanism to effectively incorporate multi-scale representations. In addition, HUTFormer employs an efficient input embedding strategy to address the complexity issues. Extensive experiments on four traffic datasets show that the proposed HUTFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art traffic forecasting and long time series forecasting baselines.

RuiQi Liu, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang et al.

Continual learning (CL) aims to learn new tasks without erasing previous knowledge. However, current CL methods primarily emphasize improving accuracy while often neglecting training efficiency, which consequently restricts their practical application. Drawing inspiration from the brain's contextual gating mechanism, which selectively filters neural information and continuously updates past memories, we propose Low-redundancy Distillation (LoRD), a novel CL method that enhances model performance while maintaining training efficiency. This is achieved by eliminating redundancy in three aspects of CL: student model redundancy, teacher model redundancy, and rehearsal sample redundancy. By compressing the learnable parameters of the student model and pruning the teacher model, LoRD facilitates the retention and optimization of prior knowledge, effectively decoupling task-specific knowledge without manually assigning isolated parameters for each task. Furthermore, we optimize the selection of rehearsal samples and refine rehearsal frequency to improve training efficiency. Through a meticulous design of distillation and rehearsal strategies, LoRD effectively balances training efficiency and model precision. Extensive experimentation across various benchmark datasets and environments demonstrates LoRD's superiority, achieving the highest accuracy with the lowest training FLOPs.

Han Yang, Qiuli Wang, Yue Zhang et al.

Radiologists possess diverse training and clinical experiences, leading to variations in the segmentation annotations of lung nodules and resulting in segmentation uncertainty.Conventional methods typically select a single annotation as the learning target or attempt to learn a latent space comprising multiple annotations. However, these approaches fail to leverage the valuable information inherent in the consensus and disagreements among the multiple annotations. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Attention Mechanism (UAAM) that utilizes consensus and disagreements among multiple annotations to facilitate better segmentation. To this end, we introduce the Multi-Confidence Mask (MCM), which combines a Low-Confidence (LC) Mask and a High-Confidence (HC) Mask.The LC mask indicates regions with low segmentation confidence, where radiologists may have different segmentation choices. Following UAAM, we further design an Uncertainty-Guide Multi-Confidence Segmentation Network (UGMCS-Net), which contains three modules: a Feature Extracting Module that captures a general feature of a lung nodule, an Uncertainty-Aware Module that produces three features for the the annotations' union, intersection, and annotation set, and an Intersection-Union Constraining Module that uses distances between the three features to balance the predictions of final segmentation and MCM. To comprehensively demonstrate the performance of our method, we propose a Complex Nodule Validation on LIDC-IDRI, which tests UGMCS-Net's segmentation performance on lung nodules that are difficult to segment using common methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the segmentation performance on nodules that are difficult to segment using conventional methods.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Zijia An et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires a model to continually learn new classes without forgetting old ones. A common and efficient solution freezes a pre-trained model and employs lightweight adapters, whose parameters are often forced to be orthogonal to prevent inter-task interference. However, we argue that this parameter-constraining method is detrimental to plasticity. To this end, we propose Semantic-Guided Dynamic Sparsification (SGDS), a novel method that proactively guides the activation space by governing the orientation and rank of its subspaces through targeted sparsification. Specifically, SGDS promotes knowledge transfer by encouraging similar classes to share a compact activation subspace, while simultaneously preventing interference by assigning non-overlapping activation subspaces to dissimilar classes. By sculpting class-specific sparse subspaces in the activation space, SGDS effectively mitigates interference without imposing rigid constraints on the parameter space. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SGDS.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Zijia An et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to continuously acquire new classes without forgetting previously learned ones. A dominant paradigm involves freezing a pre-trained model and training lightweight, task-specific adapters. However, maintaining task-specific parameters hinders knowledge transfer and incurs high retrieval costs, while naive parameter fusion often leads to destructive interference and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamical Adapter Fusion (DAF) to construct a single robust global adapter. Grounded in the PAC-Bayes theorem, we derive a fusion mechanism that explicitly integrates three components: the optimized task-specific adapter parameters, the previous global adapter parameters, and the initialization parameters. We utilize the Taylor expansion of the loss function to derive the optimal fusion coefficients, dynamically achieving the best balance between stability and plasticity. Furthermore, we propose a Robust Initialization strategy to effectively capture global knowledge patterns. Experiments on multiple CIL benchmarks demonstrate that DAF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Hangda Liu et al.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to learn new classes without forgetting old ones. A common method is to freeze a pre-trained model and train a new, lightweight adapter for each task. While this prevents forgetting, it treats the learned knowledge as a simple, unstructured collection and fails to use the relationships between tasks. To this end, we propose the Semantic-guided Adaptive Expert Forest (SAEF), a new method that organizes adapters into a structured hierarchy for better knowledge sharing. SAEF first groups tasks into conceptual clusters based on their semantic relationships. Then, within each cluster, it builds a balanced expert tree by creating new adapters from merging the adapters of similar tasks. At inference time, SAEF finds and activates a set of relevant experts from the forest for any given input. The final prediction is made by combining the outputs of these activated experts, weighted by how confident each expert is. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that SAEF achieves SOTA performance.

Yu Wang, Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An et al.

Existing Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods often align feature information between teacher and student by exploring meaningful feature processing and loss functions. However, due to the difference in feature distributions between the teacher and student, the student model may learn incompatible information from the teacher. To address this problem, we propose teacher-guided student Diffusion Self-KD, dubbed as DSKD. Instead of the direct teacher-student alignment, we leverage the teacher classifier to guide the sampling process of denoising student features through a light-weight diffusion model. We then propose a novel locality-sensitive hashing (LSH)-guided feature distillation method between the original and denoised student features. The denoised student features encapsulate teacher knowledge and could be regarded as a teacher role. In this way, our DSKD method could eliminate discrepancies in mapping manners and feature distributions between the teacher and student, while learning meaningful knowledge from the teacher. Experiments on visual recognition tasks demonstrate that DSKD significantly outperforms existing KD methods across various models and datasets. Our code is attached in supplementary material.

Zijia An, Boyu Diao, Ruiqi Liu et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating trainable prompts into pretrained models enables effective incremental learning. However, the application of prompts in incremental object detection (IOD) remains underexplored. Existing prompts pool based approaches assume disjoint class sets across incremental tasks, which are unsuitable for IOD as they overlook the inherent co-occurrence phenomenon in detection images. In co-occurring scenarios, unlabeled objects from previous tasks may appear in current task images, leading to confusion in prompts pool. In this paper, we hold that prompt structures should exhibit adaptive consolidation properties across tasks, with constrained updates to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Motivated by this, we introduce Parameterized Prompts for Incremental Object Detection (P$^2$IOD). Leveraging neural networks global evolution properties, P$^2$IOD employs networks as the parameterized prompts to adaptively consolidate knowledge across tasks. To constrain prompts structure updates, P$^2$IOD further engages a parameterized prompts fusion strategy. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC2007 and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that P$^2$IOD's effectiveness in IOD and achieves the state-of-the-art performance among existing baselines.

Yuqi Li, Yizhi Luo, Xiaoshuai Hao et al.

In this report, we describe the technical details of our submission to the EPIC-SOUNDS Audio-Based Interaction Recognition Challenge 2023, by Team "AcieLee" (username: Yuqi\_Li). The task is to classify the audio caused by interactions between objects, or from events of the camera wearer. We conducted exhaustive experiments and found learning rate step decay, backbone frozen, label smoothing and focal loss contribute most to the performance improvement. After training, we combined multiple models from different stages and integrated them into a single model by assigning fusion weights. This proposed method allowed us to achieve 3rd place in the CVPR 2023 workshop of EPIC-SOUNDS Audio-Based Interaction Recognition Challenge.

Yuqi Li, Chuanguang Yang, Hansheng Zeng et al.

Spatiotemporal forecasting tasks, such as traffic flow, combustion dynamics, and weather forecasting, often require complex models that suffer from low training efficiency and high memory consumption. This paper proposes a lightweight framework, Spectral Decoupled Knowledge Distillation (termed SDKD), which transfers the multi-scale spatiotemporal representations from a complex teacher model to a more efficient lightweight student network. The teacher model follows an encoder-latent evolution-decoder architecture, where its latent evolution module decouples high-frequency details and low-frequency trends using convolution and Transformer (global low-frequency modeler). However, the multi-layer convolution and deconvolution structures result in slow training and high memory usage. To address these issues, we propose a frequency-aligned knowledge distillation strategy, which extracts multi-scale spectral features from the teacher's latent space, including both high and low frequency components, to guide the lightweight student model in capturing both local fine-grained variations and global evolution patterns. Experimental results show that SDKD significantly improves performance, achieving reductions of up to 81.3% in MSE and in MAE 52.3% on the Navier-Stokes equation dataset. The framework effectively captures both high-frequency variations and long-term trends while reducing computational complexity. Our codes are available at https://github.com/itsnotacie/SDKD

Yingcheng Hu, Haowen Gong, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Pose-guided human image animation aims to synthesize realistic videos of a reference character driven by a sequence of poses. While diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable success, most existing approaches are limited to single-character animation. We observe that naively extending these methods to multi-character scenarios often leads to identity confusion and implausible occlusions between characters. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an extensible multi-character image animation framework built upon modern Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation. At its core, our framework introduces two novel components-Identifier Assigner and Identifier Adapter - which collaboratively capture per-person positional cues and inter-person spatial relationships. This mask-driven scheme, along with a scalable training strategy, not only enhances flexibility but also enables generalization to scenarios with more characters than those seen during training. Remarkably, trained on only a two-character dataset, our model generalizes to multi-character animation while maintaining compatibility with single-character cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-character image animation, surpassing existing diffusion-based baselines.

Weilun Feng, Chuanguang Yang, Haotong Qin et al.

Diffusion transformers (DiT) have demonstrated exceptional performance in video generation. However, their large number of parameters and high computational complexity limit their deployment on edge devices. Quantization can reduce storage requirements and accelerate inference by lowering the bit-width of model parameters. Yet, existing quantization methods for image generation models do not generalize well to video generation tasks. We identify two primary challenges: the loss of information during quantization and the misalignment between optimization objectives and the unique requirements of video generation. To address these challenges, we present Q-VDiT, a quantization framework specifically designed for video DiT models. From the quantization perspective, we propose the Token-aware Quantization Estimator (TQE), which compensates for quantization errors in both the token and feature dimensions. From the optimization perspective, we introduce Temporal Maintenance Distillation (TMD), which preserves the spatiotemporal correlations between frames and enables the optimization of each frame with respect to the overall video context. Our W3A6 Q-VDiT achieves a scene consistency of 23.40, setting a new benchmark and outperforming current state-of-the-art quantization methods by 1.9$\times$. Code will be available at https://github.com/cantbebetter2/Q-VDiT.

Yuqi Li, Junhao Dong, Zeyu Dong et al.

3D point cloud segmentation faces practical challenges due to the computational complexity and deployment limitations of large-scale transformer-based models. To address this, we propose a novel Structure- and Relation-aware Knowledge Distillation framework, named SRKD, that transfers rich geometric and semantic knowledge from a large frozen teacher model (>100M) to a lightweight student model (<15M). Specifically, we propose an affinity matrix-based relation alignment module, which distills structural dependencies from the teacher to the student through point-wise similarity matching, enhancing the student's capability to learn contextual interactions. Meanwhile, we introduce a cross-sample mini-batch construction strategy that enables the student to perceive stable and generalized geometric structure. This aligns across diverse point cloud instances of the teacher, rather than within a single sample. Additionally, KL divergence is applied to align semantic distributions, and ground-truth supervision further reinforces accurate segmentation. Our method achieves state of the art performance with significantly reduced model complexity, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in real-world deployment scenarios. Our Code is available at https://github.com/itsnotacie/SRKD.

Yipu Zhang, Jintao Cheng, Weilun Feng et al.

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models, represented by Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), jointly predict multiple visual geometry tasks such as depth estimation, camera pose prediction, and point cloud reconstruction in a single forward pass. They have been widely adopted in 3D vision applications, but their billion-scale parameters bring substantial memory and computation overhead, posing challenges for on-device deployment. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique to reduce this overhead. Existing PTQ methods for feed-forward 3D models mainly focus on handling heavy-tailed activation distributions and constructing diverse calibration datasets. However, we observe that feed-forward 3D models predict multiple geometric attributes through a shared backbone, where different transformer blocks and hidden channels contribute distinctly to each task, resulting in substantially different sensitivities to quantization errors across tasks, blocks, and channels. Consequently, treating all tasks equally over-emphasizes insensitive tasks and causes significant accuracy loss on the sensitive ones. To address this issue, we propose Fisher-Guided Quantization (FGQ) for feed-forward 3D reconstruction models. Specifically, FGQ uses the diagonal Fisher information matrix to quantify the different sensitivities across tasks, blocks, and channels, and incorporates these sensitivities into the Learnable Affine Transformation during calibration to better preserve the channels and blocks most critical to each task. Extensive experiments across camera pose estimation, point map reconstruction, and depth estimation show that FGQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art quantization baselines on VGGT, achieving up to 39% relative improvement under the 4-bit quantization.

Weilun Feng, Guoxin Fan, Haotong Qin et al.

Diffusion-based world models have shown strong potential for unified world simulation, but the iterative denoising remains too costly for interactive use and long-horizon rollouts. While feature caching can accelerate inference without training, we find that policies designed for single-modal diffusion transfer poorly to world models due to two world-model-specific obstacles: \emph{token heterogeneity} from multi-modal coupling and spatial variation, and \emph{non-uniform temporal dynamics} where a small set of hard tokens drives error growth, making uniform skipping either unstable or overly conservative. We propose \textbf{WorldCache}, a caching framework tailored to diffusion world models. We introduce \textit{Curvature-guided Heterogeneous Token Prediction}, which uses a physics-grounded curvature score to estimate token predictability and applies a Hermite-guided damped predictor for chaotic tokens with abrupt direction changes. We also design \textit{Chaotic-prioritized Adaptive Skipping}, which accumulates a curvature-normalized, dimensionless drift signal and recomputes only when bottleneck tokens begin to drift. Experiments on diffusion world models show that WorldCache delivers up to \textbf{3.7$\times$} end-to-end speedups while maintaining \textbf{98\%} rollout quality, demonstrating the vast advantages and practicality of WorldCache in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/FofGofx/WorldCache.

Weilun Feng, Chuanguang Yang, Haotong Qin et al.

Diffusion transformers exhibit remarkable video generation capability, yet their prohibitive computational and memory costs hinder practical deployment. Model quantization and attention sparsification are two promising directions for compression, but each alone suffers severe performance degradation under aggressive compression. Combining them promises compounded efficiency gains, but naive integration is ineffective. The sparsity-induced information loss exacerbates quantization noise, leading to amplified attention shifts. To address this, we propose \textbf{QuantSparse}, a unified framework that integrates model quantization with attention sparsification. Specifically, we introduce \textit{Multi-Scale Salient Attention Distillation}, which leverages both global structural guidance and local salient supervision to mitigate quantization-induced bias. In addition, we develop \textit{Second-Order Sparse Attention Reparameterization}, which exploits the temporal stability of second-order residuals to efficiently recover information lost under sparsity. Experiments on HunyuanVideo-13B demonstrate that QuantSparse achieves 20.88 PSNR, substantially outperforming the state-of-the-art quantization baseline Q-VDiT (16.85 PSNR), while simultaneously delivering a \textbf{3.68$\times$} reduction in storage and \textbf{1.88$\times$} acceleration in end-to-end inference. Our code will be released in https://github.com/wlfeng0509/QuantSparse.

Weilun Feng, Haotong Qin, Mingqiang Wu et al.

Learning-based 3D reconstruction models, represented by Visual Geometry Grounded Transformers (VGGTs), have made remarkable progress with the use of large-scale transformers. Their prohibitive computational and memory costs severely hinder real-world deployment. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) has become a common practice for compressing and accelerating models. However, we empirically observe that PTQ faces unique obstacles when compressing billion-scale VGGTs: the data-independent special tokens induce heavy-tailed activation distributions, while the multi-view nature of 3D data makes calibration sample selection highly unstable. This paper proposes the first Quantization framework for VGGTs, namely QuantVGGT. This mainly relies on two technical contributions: First, we introduce Dual-Smoothed Fine-Grained Quantization, which integrates pre-global Hadamard rotation and post-local channel smoothing to mitigate heavy-tailed distributions and inter-channel variance robustly. Second, we design Noise-Filtered Diverse Sampling, which filters outliers via deep-layer statistics and constructs frame-aware diverse calibration clusters to ensure stable quantization ranges. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that QuantVGGT achieves the state-of-the-art results across different benchmarks and bit-width, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art generic quantization method with a great margin. We highlight that our 4-bit QuantVGGT can deliver a 3.7$\times$ memory reduction and 2.5$\times$ acceleration in real-hardware inference, while maintaining reconstruction accuracy above 98\% of its full-precision counterpart. This demonstrates the vast advantages and practicality of QuantVGGT in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/wlfeng0509/QuantVGGT.

Fei Wang, Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao et al.

Recent advancements in deep learning models for time series forecasting have been significant. These models often leverage fundamental time series properties such as seasonality and non-stationarity, which may suggest an intrinsic link between model performance and data properties. However, existing benchmark datasets fail to offer diverse and well-defined temporal patterns, restricting the systematic evaluation of such connections. Additionally, there is no effective model recommendation approach, leading to high time and cost expenditures when testing different architectures across different downstream applications. For those reasons, we propose ARIES, a framework for assessing relation between time series properties and modeling strategies, and for recommending deep forcasting models for realistic time series. First, we construct a synthetic dataset with multiple distinct patterns, and design a comprehensive system to compute the properties of time series. Next, we conduct an extensive benchmarking of over 50 forecasting models, and establish the relationship between time series properties and modeling strategies. Our experimental results reveal a clear correlation. Based on these findings, we propose the first deep forecasting model recommender, capable of providing interpretable suggestions for real-world time series. In summary, ARIES is the first study to establish the relations between the properties of time series data and modeling strategies, while also implementing a model recommendation system. The code is available at: https://github.com/blisky-li/ARIES.

Weilun Feng, Haotong Qin, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Diffusion transformers have emerged as the mainstream paradigm for video generation models. However, the use of up to billions of parameters incurs significant computational costs. Quantization offers a promising solution by reducing memory usage and accelerating inference. Nonetheless, we observe that the joint modeling of spatial and temporal information in video diffusion models (V-DMs) leads to extremely long token sequences, which introduces high calibration variance and learning challenges. To address these issues, we propose S$^2$Q-VDiT, a post-training quantization framework for V-DMs that leverages Salient data and Sparse token distillation. During the calibration phase, we identify that quantization performance is highly sensitive to the choice of calibration data. To mitigate this, we introduce \textit{Hessian-aware Salient Data Selection}, which constructs high-quality calibration datasets by considering both diffusion and quantization characteristics unique to V-DMs. To tackle the learning challenges, we further analyze the sparse attention patterns inherent in V-DMs. Based on this observation, we propose \textit{Attention-guided Sparse Token Distillation}, which exploits token-wise attention distributions to emphasize tokens that are more influential to the model's output. Under W4A6 quantization, S$^2$Q-VDiT achieves lossless performance while delivering $3.9\times$ model compression and $1.3\times$ inference acceleration. Code will be available at https://github.com/wlfeng0509/s2q-vdit.

Libo Huang, Zhulin An, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) based on pre-trained models offers a promising direction for open-world continual learning. Existing methods typically rely on correlation-based strategies, where an image's classification feature is used as a query to retrieve the most related key prompts and select the corresponding value prompts for training. However, these approaches face an inherent limitation: fitting the entire feature space of all tasks with only a few trainable prompts is fundamentally challenging. We propose Predictive Prompting (PrePrompt), a novel CIL framework that circumvents correlation-based limitations by leveraging pre-trained models' natural classification ability to predict task-specific prompts. Specifically, PrePrompt decomposes CIL into a two-stage prediction framework: task-specific prompt prediction followed by label prediction. While theoretically appealing, this framework risks bias toward recent classes due to missing historical data for older classifier calibration. PrePrompt then mitigates this by incorporating feature translation, dynamically balancing stability and plasticity. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate PrePrompt's superiority over state-of-the-art prompt-based CIL methods. Code available at \href{github.com/libo-huang/preprompt}{github.com/libo-huang/preprompt}.

Zijia An, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang et al.

Existing Incremental Object Detection (IOD) methods partially alleviate catastrophic forgetting when incrementally detecting new objects in real-world scenarios. However, many of these methods rely on the assumption that unlabeled old-class objects may co-occur with labeled new-class objects in the incremental data. When unlabeled old-class objects are absent, the performance of existing methods tends to degrade. The absence can be mitigated by generating old-class samples, but it incurs high costs. This paper argues that previous generation-based IOD suffers from redundancy, both in the use of generative models, which require additional training and storage, and in the overproduction of generated samples, many of which do not contribute significantly to performance improvements. To eliminate the redundancy, we propose Inversed Objects Replay (IOR). Specifically, we generate old-class samples by inversing the original detectors, thus eliminating the necessity of training and storing additional generative models. We propose augmented replay to reuse the objects in generated samples, reducing redundant generations. Moreover, we propose high-value knowledge distillation focusing on the positions of old-class objects overwhelmed by the background, which transfers the knowledge to the incremental detector. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO 2017 demonstrate that our method can efficiently improve detection performance in IOD scenarios with the absence of old-class objects. The code is available at https://github.com/JiaJia075/IOR.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Linhang Cai et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective framework that aims to transfer meaningful information from a large teacher to a smaller student. Generally, KD often involves how to define and transfer knowledge. Previous KD methods often focus on mining various forms of knowledge, for example, feature maps and refined information. However, the knowledge is derived from the primary supervised task and thus is highly task-specific. Motivated by the recent success of self-supervised representation learning, we propose an auxiliary self-supervision augmented task to guide networks to learn more meaningful features. Therefore, we can derive soft self-supervision augmented distributions as richer dark knowledge from this task for KD. Unlike previous knowledge, this distribution encodes joint knowledge from supervised and self-supervised feature learning. Beyond knowledge exploration, we propose to append several auxiliary branches at various hidden layers, to fully take advantage of hierarchical feature maps. Each auxiliary branch is guided to learn self-supervision augmented task and distill this distribution from teacher to student. Overall, we call our KD method as Hierarchical Self-Supervision Augmented Knowledge Distillation (HSSAKD). Experiments on standard image classification show that both offline and online HSSAKD achieves state-of-the-art performance in the field of KD. Further transfer experiments on object detection further verify that HSSAKD can guide the network to learn better features. The code is available at https://github.com/winycg/HSAKD.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Linhang Cai et al.

Knowledge distillation often involves how to define and transfer knowledge from teacher to student effectively. Although recent self-supervised contrastive knowledge achieves the best performance, forcing the network to learn such knowledge may damage the representation learning of the original class recognition task. We therefore adopt an alternative self-supervised augmented task to guide the network to learn the joint distribution of the original recognition task and self-supervised auxiliary task. It is demonstrated as a richer knowledge to improve the representation power without losing the normal classification capability. Moreover, it is incomplete that previous methods only transfer the probabilistic knowledge between the final layers. We propose to append several auxiliary classifiers to hierarchical intermediate feature maps to generate diverse self-supervised knowledge and perform the one-to-one transfer to teach the student network thoroughly. Our method significantly surpasses the previous SOTA SSKD with an average improvement of 2.56\% on CIFAR-100 and an improvement of 0.77\% on ImageNet across widely used network pairs. Codes are available at https://github.com/winycg/HSAKD.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Linhang Cai et al.

We present a collaborative learning method called Mutual Contrastive Learning (MCL) for general visual representation learning. The core idea of MCL is to perform mutual interaction and transfer of contrastive distributions among a cohort of networks. A crucial component of MCL is Interactive Contrastive Learning (ICL). Compared with vanilla contrastive learning, ICL can aggregate cross-network embedding information and maximize the lower bound to the mutual information between two networks. This enables each network to learn extra contrastive knowledge from others, leading to better feature representations for visual recognition tasks. We emphasize that the resulting MCL is conceptually simple yet empirically powerful. It is a generic framework that can be applied to both supervised and self-supervised representation learning. Experimental results on image classification and transfer learning to object detection show that MCL can lead to consistent performance gains, demonstrating that MCL can guide the network to generate better feature representations. Code is available at https://github.com/winycg/MCL.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu

Previous Online Knowledge Distillation (OKD) often carries out mutually exchanging probability distributions, but neglects the useful representational knowledge. We therefore propose Multi-view Contrastive Learning (MCL) for OKD to implicitly capture correlations of feature embeddings encoded by multiple peer networks, which provide various views for understanding the input data instances. Benefiting from MCL, we can learn a more discriminative representation space for classification than previous OKD methods. Experimental results on image classification demonstrate that our MCL-OKD outperforms other state-of-the-art OKD methods by large margins without sacrificing additional inference cost. Codes are available at https://github.com/winycg/MCL-OKD.

Weilun Feng, Haotong Qin, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Diffusion models have received wide attention in generation tasks. However, the expensive computation cost prevents the application of diffusion models in resource-constrained scenarios. Quantization emerges as a practical solution that significantly saves storage and computation by reducing the bit-width of parameters. However, the existing quantization methods for diffusion models still cause severe degradation in performance, especially under extremely low bit-widths (2-4 bit). The primary decrease in performance comes from the significant discretization of activation values at low bit quantization. Too few activation candidates are unfriendly for outlier significant weight channel quantization, and the discretized features prevent stable learning over different time steps of the diffusion model. This paper presents MPQ-DM, a Mixed-Precision Quantization method for Diffusion Models. The proposed MPQ-DM mainly relies on two techniques:(1) To mitigate the quantization error caused by outlier severe weight channels, we propose an Outlier-Driven Mixed Quantization (OMQ) technique that uses $Kurtosis$ to quantify outlier salient channels and apply optimized intra-layer mixed-precision bit-width allocation to recover accuracy performance within target efficiency.(2) To robustly learn representations crossing time steps, we construct a Time-Smoothed Relation Distillation (TRD) scheme between the quantized diffusion model and its full-precision counterpart, transferring discrete and continuous latent to a unified relation space to reduce the representation inconsistency. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MPQ-DM achieves significant accuracy gains under extremely low bit-widths compared with SOTA quantization methods. MPQ-DM achieves a 58\% FID decrease under W2A4 setting compared with baseline, while all other methods even collapse.

Chuanguang Yang, Xinqiang Yu, Han Yang et al.

Multi-teacher Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers diverse knowledge from a teacher pool to a student network. The core problem of multi-teacher KD is how to balance distillation strengths among various teachers. Most existing methods often develop weighting strategies from an individual perspective of teacher performance or teacher-student gaps, lacking comprehensive information for guidance. This paper proposes Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation with Reinforcement Learning (MTKD-RL) to optimize multi-teacher weights. In this framework, we construct both teacher performance and teacher-student gaps as state information to an agent. The agent outputs the teacher weight and can be updated by the return reward from the student. MTKD-RL reinforces the interaction between the student and teacher using an agent in an RL-based decision mechanism, achieving better matching capability with more meaningful weights. Experimental results on visual recognition tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, demonstrate that MTKD-RL achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to the existing multi-teacher KD works.

Yuqi Li, Chuanguang Yang, Junhao Dong et al.

The success of large-scale visual language pretraining (VLP) models has driven widespread adoption of image-text retrieval tasks. However, their deployment on mobile devices remains limited due to large model sizes and computational complexity. We propose Adaptive Multi-Modal Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation (AMMKD), a novel framework that integrates multi-modal feature fusion, multi-teacher distillation, and adaptive optimization to deliver lightweight yet effective retrieval models. Specifically, our method begins with a feature fusion network that extracts and merges discriminative features from both the image and text modalities. To reduce model parameters and further improve performance, we design a multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework to pre-train two CLIP teacher models. We decouple modalities by pre-computing and storing text features as class vectors via the teacher text encoder to enhance efficiency. To better align teacher and student outputs, we apply KL scatter for probability distribution matching. Finally, we design an adaptive dynamic weighting scheme that treats multi-teacher distillation as a multi-objective optimization problem. By leveraging gradient space diversity, we dynamically adjust the influence of each teacher, reducing conflicts and guiding the student toward more optimal learning directions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AMMKD achieves superior performance while significantly reducing model complexity, validating its effectiveness and flexibility.

Han Yang, Chuanguang Yang, Qiuli Wang et al.

The rapid advancement of diffusion models has increased the need for customized image generation. However, current customization methods face several limitations: 1) typically accept either image or text conditions alone; 2) customization in complex visual scenarios often leads to subject leakage or confusion; 3) image-conditioned outputs tend to suffer from inconsistent backgrounds; and 4) high computational costs. To address these issues, this paper introduces Multi-party Collaborative Attention Control (MCA-Ctrl), a tuning-free method that enables high-quality image customization using both text and complex visual conditions. Specifically, MCA-Ctrl leverages two key operations within the self-attention layer to coordinate multiple parallel diffusion processes and guide the target image generation. This approach allows MCA-Ctrl to capture the content and appearance of specific subjects while maintaining semantic consistency with the conditional input. Additionally, to mitigate subject leakage and confusion issues common in complex visual scenarios, we introduce a Subject Localization Module that extracts precise subject and editable image layers based on user instructions. Extensive quantitative and human evaluation experiments show that MCA-Ctrl outperforms existing methods in zero-shot image customization, effectively resolving the mentioned issues.

Chengqing Yu, Fei Wang, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) involves predicting future values of multiple interrelated time series. Recently, deep learning-based MTSF models have gained significant attention for their promising ability to mine semantics (global and local information) within MTS data. However, these models are pervasively susceptible to missing values caused by malfunctioning data collectors. These missing values not only disrupt the semantics of MTS, but their distribution also changes over time. Nevertheless, existing models lack robustness to such issues, leading to suboptimal forecasting performance. To this end, in this paper, we propose Multi-View Representation Learning (Merlin), which can help existing models achieve semantic alignment between incomplete observations with different missing rates and complete observations in MTS. Specifically, Merlin consists of two key modules: offline knowledge distillation and multi-view contrastive learning. The former utilizes a teacher model to guide a student model in mining semantics from incomplete observations, similar to those obtainable from complete observations. The latter improves the student model's robustness by learning from positive/negative data pairs constructed from incomplete observations with different missing rates, ensuring semantic alignment across different missing rates. Therefore, Merlin is capable of effectively enhancing the robustness of existing models against unfixed missing rates while preserving forecasting accuracy. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of Merlin.

Weilun Feng, Chuanguang Yang, Haotong Qin et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance on vision generation tasks. However, the high computational complexity hinders its wide application on edge devices. Quantization has emerged as a promising technique for inference acceleration and memory reduction. However, existing quantization methods do not generalize well under extremely low-bit (2-4 bit) quantization. Directly applying these methods will cause severe performance degradation. We identify that the existing quantization framework suffers from the outlier-unfriendly quantizer design, suboptimal initialization, and optimization strategy. We present MPQ-DMv2, an improved \textbf{M}ixed \textbf{P}recision \textbf{Q}uantization framework for extremely low-bit \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{M}odels. For the quantization perspective, the imbalanced distribution caused by salient outliers is quantization-unfriendly for uniform quantizer. We propose \textit{Flexible Z-Order Residual Mixed Quantization} that utilizes an efficient binary residual branch for flexible quant steps to handle salient error. For the optimization framework, we theoretically analyzed the convergence and optimality of the LoRA module and propose \textit{Object-Oriented Low-Rank Initialization} to use prior quantization error for informative initialization. We then propose \textit{Memory-based Temporal Relation Distillation} to construct an online time-aware pixel queue for long-term denoising temporal information distillation, which ensures the overall temporal consistency between quantized and full-precision model. Comprehensive experiments on various generation tasks show that our MPQ-DMv2 surpasses current SOTA methods by a great margin on different architectures, especially under extremely low-bit widths.

Ruiqi Liu, Boyu Diao, Libo Huang et al.

Continual learning (CL) aims to learn new tasks while retaining past knowledge, addressing the challenge of forgetting during task adaptation. Rehearsal-based methods, which replay previous samples, effectively mitigate forgetting. However, research on enhancing the efficiency of these methods, especially in resource-constrained environments, remains limited, hindering their application in real-world systems with dynamic data streams. The human perceptual system processes visual scenes through complementary frequency channels: low-frequency signals capture holistic cues, while high-frequency components convey structural details vital for fine-grained discrimination. Inspired by this, we propose the Frequency Decomposition and Integration Network (FDINet), a novel framework that decomposes and integrates information across frequencies. FDINet designs two lightweight networks to independently process low- and high-frequency components of images. When integrated with rehearsal-based methods, this frequency-aware design effectively enhances cross-task generalization through low-frequency information, preserves class-specific details using high-frequency information, and facilitates efficient training due to its lightweight architecture. Experiments demonstrate that FDINet reduces backbone parameters by 78%, improves accuracy by up to 7.49% over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and decreases peak memory usage by up to 80%. Additionally, on edge devices, FDINet accelerates training by up to 5$\times$.

Libo Huang, Zhulin An, Yan Zeng et al.

Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning (efCIL) aims to continuously incorporate the knowledge from new classes while retaining previously learned information, without storing any old-class exemplars (i.e., samples). For this purpose, various efCIL methods have been proposed over the past few years, generally with elaborately constructed old pseudo-features, increasing the difficulty of model development and interpretation. In contrast, we propose a \textbf{simple Incremental Representation (IR) framework} for efCIL without constructing old pseudo-features. IR utilizes dataset augmentation to cover a suitable feature space and prevents the model from forgetting by using a single L2 space maintenance loss. We discard the transient classifier trained on each one of the sequence tasks and instead replace it with a 1-near-neighbor classifier for inference, ensuring the representation is incrementally updated during CIL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed IR achieves comparable performance while significantly preventing the model from forgetting on CIFAR100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNetSubset datasets.

Yisong Fu, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu et al.

Benefiting from high capacity for capturing complex temporal patterns, deep learning (DL) has significantly advanced time series forecasting (TSF). However, deep models tend to suffer from severe overfitting due to the inherent vulnerability of time series to noise and anomalies. The prevailing DL paradigm uniformly optimizes all timesteps through the MSE loss and learns those uncertain and anomalous timesteps without difference, ultimately resulting in overfitting. To address this, we propose a novel selective learning strategy for deep TSF. Specifically, selective learning screens a subset of the whole timesteps to calculate the MSE loss in optimization, guiding the model to focus on generalizable timesteps while disregarding non-generalizable ones. Our framework introduces a dual-mask mechanism to target timesteps: (1) an uncertainty mask leveraging residual entropy to filter uncertain timesteps, and (2) an anomaly mask employing residual lower bound estimation to exclude anomalous timesteps. Extensive experiments across eight real-world datasets demonstrate that selective learning can significantly improve the predictive performance for typical state-of-the-art deep models, including 37.4% MSE reduction for Informer, 8.4% for TimesNet, and 6.5% for iTransformer.

Chen Yan, Boyu Diao, Hangda Liu et al.

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is a fundamental operation with a wide range of applications in scientific computing and artificial intelligence. However, the large scale and sparsity of sparse matrix often make it a performance bottleneck. In this paper, we highlight the effectiveness of hash-based techniques in optimizing sparse matrix reordering, introducing the Hash-based Partition (HBP) format, a lightweight SpMV approach. HBP retains the performance benefits of the 2D-partitioning method while leveraging the hash transformation's ability to group similar elements, thereby accelerating the pre-processing phase of sparse matrix reordering. Additionally, we achieve parallel load balancing across matrix blocks through a competitive method. Our experiments, conducted on both Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin and Nvidia RTX 4090, show that in the pre-processing step, our method offers an average speedup of 3.53 times compared to the sorting approach and 3.67 times compared to the dynamic programming method employed in Regu2D. Furthermore, in SpMV, our method achieves a maximum speedup of 3.32 times on Orin and 3.01 times on RTX4090 against the CSR format in sparse matrices from the University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection.

Xinqiang Yu, Chuanguang Yang, Chengqing Yu et al.

Policy Distillation (PD) has become an effective method to improve deep reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of PD is to distill policy knowledge from a teacher agent to a student agent. However, the teacher-student framework requires a well-trained teacher model which is computationally expensive.In the light of online knowledge distillation, we study the knowledge transfer between different policies that can learn diverse knowledge from the same environment.In this work, we propose Online Policy Distillation (OPD) with Decision-Attention (DA), an online learning framework in which different policies operate in the same environment to learn different perspectives of the environment and transfer knowledge to each other to obtain better performance together. With the absence of a well-performance teacher policy, the group-derived targets play a key role in transferring group knowledge to each student policy. However, naive aggregation functions tend to cause student policies quickly homogenize. To address the challenge, we introduce the Decision-Attention module to the online policies distillation framework. The Decision-Attention module can generate a distinct set of weights for each policy to measure the importance of group members. We use the Atari platform for experiments with various reinforcement learning algorithms, including PPO and DQN. In different tasks, our method can perform better than an independent training policy on both PPO and DQN algorithms. This suggests that our OPD-DA can transfer knowledge between different policies well and help agents obtain more rewards.

Libo Huang, Zhulin An, Xiang Zhi et al.

Generative models often incur the catastrophic forgetting problem when they are used to sequentially learning multiple tasks, i.e., lifelong generative learning. Although there are some endeavors to tackle this problem, they suffer from high time-consumptions or error accumulation. In this work, we develop an efficient and effective lifelong generative model based on variational autoencoder (VAE). Unlike the generative adversarial network, VAE enjoys high efficiency in the training process, providing natural benefits with few resources. We deduce a lifelong generative model by expending the intrinsic reconstruction character of VAE to the historical knowledge retention. Further, we devise a feedback strategy about the reconstructed data to alleviate the error accumulation. Experiments on the lifelong generating tasks of MNIST, FashionMNIST, and SVHN verified the efficacy of our approach, where the results were comparable to SOTA.

Linhang Cai, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu

Filter pruning is widely used to reduce the computation of deep learning, enabling the deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in resource-limited devices. Conventional Hard Filter Pruning (HFP) method zeroizes pruned filters and stops updating them, thus reducing the search space of the model. On the contrary, Soft Filter Pruning (SFP) simply zeroizes pruned filters, keeping updating them in the following training epochs, thus maintaining the capacity of the network. However, SFP, together with its variants, converges much slower than HFP due to its larger search space. Our question is whether SFP-based methods and HFP can be combined to achieve better performance and speed up convergence. Firstly, we generalize SFP-based methods and HFP to analyze their characteristics. Then we propose a Gradually Hard Filter Pruning (GHFP) method to smoothly switch from SFP-based methods to HFP during training and pruning, thus maintaining a large search space at first, gradually reducing the capacity of the model to ensure a moderate convergence speed. Experimental results on CIFAR-10/100 show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Linhang Cai, Zhulin An, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Network pruning is widely used to compress Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The Soft Filter Pruning (SFP) method zeroizes the pruned filters during training while updating them in the next training epoch. Thus the trained information of the pruned filters is completely dropped. To utilize the trained pruned filters, we proposed a SofteR Filter Pruning (SRFP) method and its variant, Asymptotic SofteR Filter Pruning (ASRFP), simply decaying the pruned weights with a monotonic decreasing parameter. Our methods perform well across various networks, datasets and pruning rates, also transferable to weight pruning. On ILSVRC-2012, ASRFP prunes 40% of the parameters on ResNet-34 with 1.63% top-1 and 0.68% top-5 accuracy improvement. In theory, SRFP and ASRFP are an incremental regularization of the pruned filters. Besides, We note that SRFP and ASRFP pursue better results while slowing down the speed of convergence.

Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Xiaolong Hu et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) always depend on wider receptive field (RF) and more complex non-linearity to achieve state-of-the-art performance, while suffering the increased difficult to interpret how relevant patches contribute the final prediction. In this paper, we construct an interpretable AnchorNet equipped with our carefully designed RFs and linearly spatial aggregation to provide patch-wise interpretability of the input media meanwhile localizing multi-scale informative patches only supervised on media-level labels without any extra bounding box annotations. Visualization of localized informative image and text patches show the superior multi-scale localization capability of AnchorNet. We further use localized patches for downstream classification tasks across widely applied networks. Experimental results demonstrate that replacing the original inputs with their patches for classification can get a clear inference acceleration with only tiny performance degradation, which proves that localized patches can indeed retain the most semantics and evidences of the original inputs.