G. Li

Guopeng Li, Qiang Wang, Ke Yan et al.

Most knowledge distillation (KD) methodologies predominantly focus on teacher-student pairs with similar architectures, such as both being convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the potential and flexibility of KD can be greatly improved by expanding it to novel Cross-Architecture KD (CAKD), where the knowledge of homogeneous and heterogeneous teachers can be transferred flexibly to a given student. The primary challenge in CAKD lies in the substantial feature gaps between heterogeneous models, originating from the distinction of their inherent inductive biases and module functions. To this end, we introduce an assistant model as a bridge to facilitate smooth feature knowledge transfer between heterogeneous teachers and students. More importantly, within our proposed design principle, the assistant model combines the advantages of cross-architecture inductive biases and module functions by merging convolution and attention modules derived from both student and teacher module functions. Furthermore, we observe that heterogeneous features exhibit diverse spatial distributions in CAKD, hindering the effectiveness of conventional pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE) loss. Therefore, we leverage a spatial-agnostic InfoNCE loss to align features after spatial smoothing, thereby improving the feature alignments in CAKD. Our proposed method is evaluated across some homogeneous model pairs and arbitrary heterogeneous combinations of CNNs, ViTs, and MLPs, achieving state-of-the-art performance for distilled models with a maximum gain of 11.47% on CIFAR-100 and 3.67% on ImageNet-1K. Our code and models will be released.

Yuni Lai, Xiaoyu Xue, Linghui Shen et al.

Language-empowered foundation models (LeFMs), such as CLIP and GraphCLIP, have transformed multimodal learning by aligning visual (or graph) features with textual representations, enabling powerful downstream capabilities like few-shot learning. However, the reliance on small, task-specific support datasets collected in open environments exposes these models to poisoning attacks, where adversaries manipulate the support samples to degrade performance. Existing defenses rely on empirical strategies, which lack formal guarantees and remain vulnerable to unseen and adaptive attacks. Certified robustness offers provable guarantees but has been largely unexplored for few-shot classifiers based on LeFMs. This study seeks to fill these critical gaps by proposing the first provably robust few-shot classifier that is tailored for LeFMs. We term our model Language-empowered Few-shot Certification (\textbf{LeFCert}). It integrates both textual and feature embeddings with an adaptive blending mechanism. To achieve provable robustness, we propose a twofold trimmed mean prototype and derive provable upper and lower bounds for classification scores, enabling certification under worst-case poisoning scenarios. To further enhance the performance, we extend LeFCert with two variants by considering a more realistic and tighter attack budget: LeFCert-L incorporates randomized smoothing to provide Lipschitz continuity and derive robustness under dual budget constraints, and LeFCert-C provides collective certification for scenarios where attackers distribute a shared poisoning budget across multiple samples. Experiments demonstrate that LeFCert achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving both clean and certified accuracy compared to existing baselines. Despite its advanced robustness mechanisms, LeFCert is computationally efficient, making it practical for real-world applications.