Roy Miles

Roy Miles, Krystian Mikolajczyk

In this paper we revisit the efficacy of knowledge distillation as a function matching and metric learning problem. In doing so we verify three important design decisions, namely the normalisation, soft maximum function, and projection layers as key ingredients. We theoretically show that the projector implicitly encodes information on past examples, enabling relational gradients for the student. We then show that the normalisation of representations is tightly coupled with the training dynamics of this projector, which can have a large impact on the students performance. Finally, we show that a simple soft maximum function can be used to address any significant capacity gap problems. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that using these insights can lead to superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques, despite being much more computationally efficient. In particular, we obtain these results across image classification (CIFAR100 and ImageNet), object detection (COCO2017), and on more difficult distillation objectives, such as training data efficient transformers, whereby we attain a 77.2% top-1 accuracy with DeiT-Ti on ImageNet. Code and models are publicly available.

Roy Miles, Aysim Toker, Andreea-Maria Oncescu et al.

Reasoning with large language models often benefits from generating multiple chains-of-thought, but existing aggregation strategies are typically trajectory-level (e.g., selecting the best trace or voting on the final answer), discarding useful intermediate work from partial or "nearly correct" attempts. We propose Stitching Noisy Diffusion Thoughts, a self-consistency framework that turns cheap diffusion-sampled reasoning into a reusable pool of step-level candidates. Given a problem, we (i) sample many diverse, low-cost reasoning trajectories using a masked diffusion language model, (ii) score every intermediate step with an off-the-shelf process reward model (PRM), and (iii) stitch these highest-quality steps across trajectories into a composite rationale. This rationale then conditions an autoregressive (AR) model (solver) to recompute only the final answer. This modular pipeline separates exploration (diffusion) from evaluation and solution synthesis, avoiding monolithic unified hybrids while preserving broad search. Across math reasoning benchmarks, we find that step-level recombination is most beneficial on harder problems, and ablations highlight the importance of the final AR solver in converting stitched but imperfect rationales into accurate answers. Using low-confidence diffusion sampling with parallel, independent rollouts, our training-free framework improves average accuracy by up to 23.8% across six math and coding tasks. At the same time, it achieves up to a 1.8x latency reduction relative to both traditional diffusion models (e.g., Dream, LLaDA) and unified architectures (e.g., TiDAR). Code is available at https://github.com/roymiles/diffusion-stitching.

Roy Miles, Mehmet Kerim Yucel, Bruno Manganelli et al.

This paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones. We formulate this problem as a distillation task, whereby we demonstrate that small space-time-memory networks with finite memory can achieve competitive results with state of the art, but at a fraction of the computational cost (32 milliseconds per frame on a Samsung Galaxy S22). Specifically, we provide a theoretically grounded framework that unifies knowledge distillation with supervised contrastive representation learning. These models are able to jointly benefit from both pixel-wise contrastive learning and distillation from a pre-trained teacher. We validate this loss by achieving competitive J&F to state of the art on both the standard DAVIS and YouTube benchmarks, despite running up to 5x faster, and with 32x fewer parameters.

Roy Miles, Ismail Elezi, Jiankang Deng

Knowledge distillation is an effective method for training small and efficient deep learning models. However, the efficacy of a single method can degenerate when transferring to other tasks, modalities, or even other architectures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel constrained feature distillation method. This method is derived from a small set of core principles, which results in two emerging components: an orthogonal projection and a task-specific normalisation. Equipped with both of these components, our transformer models can outperform all previous methods on ImageNet and reach up to a 4.4% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art methods. To further demonstrate the generality of our method, we apply it to object detection and image generation, whereby we obtain consistent and substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art. Code and models are publicly available: https://github.com/roymiles/vkd

Debjit Paul, Daniel Murphy, Milan Gritta et al.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used to solve complex tasks involving tool use, such as web browsing, code execution, and data analysis. However, current evaluation benchmarks do not adequately assess their ability to solve real-world tasks that require synthesizing information from multiple sources and inferring insights beyond simple fact retrieval. To address this, we introduce DEEPSYNTH, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate agents on realistic, time-consuming problems that combine information gathering, synthesis, and structured reasoning to produce insights. DEEPSYNTH contains 120 tasks collected across 7 domains and data sources covering 67 countries. DEEPSYNTH is constructed using a multi-stage data collection pipeline that requires annotators to collect official data sources, create hypotheses, perform manual analysis, and design tasks with verifiable answers. When evaluated on DEEPSYNTH, 11 state-of-the-art LLMs and deep research agents achieve a maximum F1 score of 8.97 and 17.5 on the LLM-judge metric, underscoring the difficulty of the benchmark. Our analysis reveals that current agents struggle with hallucinations and reasoning over large information spaces, highlighting DEEPSYNTH as a crucial benchmark for guiding future research.

Aysim Toker, Andreea-Maria Oncescu, Roy Miles et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are emerging as powerful generalist tools for remote sensing, capable of integrating information across diverse tasks and enabling flexible, instruction-based interactions via a chat interface. In this work, we enhance VLM-based visual grounding in satellite imagery by proposing a novel structured localization mechanism. Our approach involves finetuning a pretrained VLM on a diverse set of instruction-following tasks, while interfacing a dedicated grounding module through specialized control tokens for localization. This method facilitates joint reasoning over both language and spatial information, significantly enhancing the model's ability to precisely localize objects in complex satellite scenes. We evaluate our framework on several remote sensing benchmarks, consistently improving the state-of-the-art, including a 24.8% relative improvement over previous methods on visual grounding. Our results highlight the benefits of integrating structured spatial reasoning into VLMs, paving the way for more reliable real-world satellite data analysis.

Yin Xie, Kaicheng Yang, Xiang An et al.

Learning visual representations is foundational for a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Although recent vision-language contrastive models, such as CLIP and SigLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot performance via large-scale vision-language alignment, their reliance on global representations constrains their effectiveness for dense prediction tasks, such as grounding, OCR, and segmentation. To address this gap, we introduce Region-Aware Cluster Discrimination (RICE), a novel method that enhances region-level visual and OCR capabilities. We first construct a billion-scale candidate region dataset and propose a Region Transformer layer to extract rich regional semantics. We further design a unified region cluster discrimination loss that jointly supports object and OCR learning within a single classification framework, enabling efficient and scalable distributed training on large-scale data. Extensive experiments show that RICE consistently outperforms previous methods on tasks, including segmentation, dense detection, and visual perception for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). The pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/deepglint/MVT.

Yin Xie, Kaicheng Yang, Peirou Liang et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often face a modality representation gap during pretraining: while language embeddings remain stable, visual representations are highly sensitive to contextual noise (e.g., background clutter). To address this issue, we introduce a visual comprehension stage, which we call ViCToR (Visual Comprehension via Token Reconstruction), a novel pretraining framework for LMMs. ViCToR employs a learnable visual token pool and utilizes the Hungarian matching algorithm to select semantically relevant tokens from this pool for visual token replacement. Furthermore, by integrating a visual token reconstruction loss with dense semantic supervision, ViCToR can learn tokens which retain high visual detail, thereby enhancing the large language model's (LLM's) understanding of visual information. After pretraining on 3 million publicly accessible images and captions, ViCToR achieves state-of-the-art results, improving over LLaVA-NeXT-8B by 10.4%, 3.2%, and 7.2% on the MMStar, SEED$^I$, and RealWorldQA benchmarks, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/deepglint/Victor.

Roy Miles, Adrian Lopez Rodriguez, Krystian Mikolajczyk

Despite the empirical success of knowledge distillation, current state-of-the-art methods are computationally expensive to train, which makes them difficult to adopt in practice. To address this problem, we introduce two distinct complementary losses inspired by a cheap entropy-like estimator. These losses aim to maximise the correlation and mutual information between the student and teacher representations. Our method incurs significantly less training overheads than other approaches and achieves competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on the knowledge distillation and cross-model transfer tasks. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a binary distillation task, whereby it leads to a new state-of-the-art for binary quantisation and approaches the performance of a full precision model. Code: www.github.com/roymiles/ITRD

Yura Choi, Roy Miles, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias et al.

Understanding and answering questions based on a user's pointing gesture is essential for next-generation egocentric AI assistants. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with such tasks due to the lack of gesture-rich data and their limited ability to infer fine-grained pointing intent from egocentric video. To address this, we introduce EgoPointVQA, a dataset and benchmark for gesture-grounded egocentric question answering, comprising 4000 synthetic and 400 real-world videos across multiple deictic reasoning tasks. Built upon it, we further propose Hand Intent Tokens (HINT), which encodes tokens derived from 3D hand keypoints using an off-the-shelf reconstruction model and interleaves them with the model input to provide explicit spatial and temporal context for interpreting pointing intent. We show that our model outperforms others in different backbones and model sizes. In particular, HINT-14B achieves 68.1% accuracy, on average over 6 tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art, InternVL3-14B, by 6.6%. To further facilitate the open research, we will release the code, model, and dataset. Project page: https://yuuraa.github.io/papers/choi2026egovqa

Moon Ye-Bin, Roy Miles, Tae-Hyun Oh et al.

Image retouching not only enhances visual quality but also serves as a means of expressing personal preferences and emotions. However, existing learning-based approaches require large-scale paired data and operate as black boxes, making the retouching process opaque and limiting their adaptability to handle diverse, user- or image-specific adjustments. In this work, we propose RetouchLLM, a training-free white-box image retouching system, which requires no training data and performs interpretable, code-based retouching directly on high-resolution images. Our framework progressively enhances the image in a manner similar to how humans perform multi-step retouching, allowing exploration of diverse adjustment paths. It comprises of two main modules: a visual critic that identifies differences between the input and reference images, and a code generator that produces executable codes. Experiments demonstrate that our approach generalizes well across diverse retouching styles, while natural language-based user interaction enables interpretable and controllable adjustments tailored to user intent.

Dylan Auty, Roy Miles, Benedikt Kolbeinsson et al.

Traditional knowledge distillation (KD) relies on a proficient teacher trained on the target task, which is not always available. In this setting, cross-task distillation can be used, enabling the use of any teacher model trained on a different task. However, many KD methods prove ineffective when applied to this cross-task setting. To address this limitation, we propose a simple modification: the use of an inverted projection. We show that this drop-in replacement for a standard projector is effective by learning to disregard any task-specific features which might degrade the student's performance. We find that this simple modification is sufficient for extending many KD methods to the cross-task setting, where the teacher and student tasks can be very different. In doing so, we obtain up to a 1.9% improvement in the cross-task setting compared to the traditional projection, at no additional cost. Our method can obtain significant performance improvements (up to 7%) when using even a randomly-initialised teacher on various tasks such as depth estimation, image translation, and semantic segmentation, despite the lack of any learned knowledge to transfer. To provide conceptual and analytical insights into this result, we show that using an inverted projection allows the distillation loss to be decomposed into a knowledge transfer and a spectral regularisation component. Through this analysis we are additionally able to propose a novel regularisation loss that allows teacher-free distillation, enabling performance improvements of up to 8.57% on ImageNet with no additional training costs.

Roy Miles, Krystian Mikolajczyk

We present an efficient alternative to the convolutional layer using cheap spatial transformations. This construction exploits an inherent spatial redundancy of the learned convolutional filters to enable a much greater parameter efficiency, while maintaining the top-end accuracy of their dense counter-parts. Training these networks is modelled as a generalised pruning problem, whereby the pruned filters are replaced with cheap transformations from the set of non-pruned filters. We provide an efficient implementation of the proposed layer, followed by two natural extensions to avoid excessive feature compression and to improve the expressivity of the transformed features. We show that these networks can achieve comparable or improved performance to state-of-the-art pruning models across both the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1K datasets.

Roy Miles, Krystian Mikolajczyk

In this paper, we propose an approach for filter-level pruning with hierarchical knowledge distillation based on the teacher, teaching-assistant, and student framework. Our method makes use of teaching assistants at intermediate pruning levels that share the same architecture and weights as the target student. We propose to prune each model independently using the gradient information from its corresponding teacher. By considering the relative sizes of each student-teacher pair, this formulation provides a natural trade-off between the capacity gap for knowledge distillation and the bias of the filter saliency updates. Our results show improvements in the attainable accuracy and model compression across the CIFAR10 and ImageNet classification tasks using the VGG16and ResNet50 architectures. We provide an extensive evaluation that demonstrates the benefits of using a varying number of teaching assistant models at different sizes.

Roy Miles, Krystian Mikolajczyk

Deep neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance for feature-based image matching through the advent of new large and diverse datasets. However, there has been little work on evaluating the computational cost, model size, and matching accuracy tradeoffs for these models. This paper explicitly addresses these practical metrics by considering the state-of-the-art HardNet model. We observe a significant redundancy in the learned weights, which we exploit through the use of depthwise separable layers and an efficient Tucker decomposition. We demonstrate that a combination of these methods is very effective, but still sacrifices the top-end accuracy. To resolve this, we propose the Convolution-Depthwise-Pointwise(CDP) layer, which provides a means of interpolating between the standard and depthwise separable convolutions. With this proposed layer, we can achieve an 8 times reduction in the number of parameters on the HardNet model, 13 times reduction in the computational complexity, while sacrificing less than 1% on the overall accuracy across theHPatchesbenchmarks. To further demonstrate the generalisation of this approach, we apply it to the state-of-the-art SuperPoint model, where we can significantly reduce the number of parameters and floating-point operations, with minimal degradation in the matching accuracy.