Cross-Modal Distillation For Widely Differing Modalities
This work addresses the problem of limited multi-modal data access for researchers and practitioners in AI, offering an incremental improvement over existing distillation methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of cross-modal knowledge distillation between widely differing modalities like image, text, and speech, where hard constraints can cause overfitting, and proposes soft distillation strategies and an adaptive weighting module, achieving effective knowledge transfer in speaker recognition and image classification tasks.
Deep learning achieved great progress recently, however, it is not easy or efficient to further improve its performance by increasing the size of the model. Multi-modal learning can mitigate this challenge by introducing richer and more discriminative information as input. To solve the problem of limited access to multi-modal data at the time of use, we conduct multi-modal learning by introducing a teacher model to transfer discriminative knowledge to a student model during training. However, this knowledge transfer via distillation is not trivial because the big domain gap between the widely differing modalities can easily lead to overfitting. In this work, we introduce a cross-modal distillation framework. Specifically, we find hard constrained loss, e.g. l2 loss forcing the student being exact the same as the teacher, can easily lead to overfitting in cross-modality distillation. To address this, we propose two soft constrained knowledge distillation strategies at the feature level and classifier level respectively. In addition, we propose a quality-based adaptive weights module to weigh input samples via quantified data quality, leading to robust model training. We conducted experiments on speaker recognition and image classification tasks, and the results show that our approach is able to effectively achieve knowledge transfer between the commonly used and widely differing modalities of image, text, and speech.