Search for: All records

We propose ViC-MAE, a model that combines both Masked AutoEncoders (MAE) and contrastive learning. ViC-MAE is trained using a global representation obtained by pooling the local features learned under an MAE reconstruction loss and using this representation under a contrastive objective across images and video frames. We show that visual representations learned under ViC-MAE generalize well to video and image classification tasks. Particularly, ViC-MAE obtains state-of-the-art transfer learning performance from video to images on Imagenet-1k compared to the recently proposed OmniMAE by achieving a top-1 accuracy of 86% (+1.3% absolute improvement) when trained on the same data and 87.1% (+2.4% absolute improvement) when training on extra data. At the same time, ViC-MAE outperforms most other methods on video benchmarks by obtaining 75.9% top-1 accuracy on the challenging Something something-v2 video benchmark. When training on videos and images from diverse datasets, our method maintains a balanced transfer-learning performance between video and image classification benchmarks, coming only as a close second to the best-supervised method. 

In this work, we propose Mutual Information Maximization Knowledge Distillation (MIMKD). Our method uses a contrastive objective to simultaneously estimate and maximize a lower bound on the mutual information of local and global feature representations between a teacher and a student network. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that this can be used to improve the performance of low capacity models by transferring knowledge from more performant but computationally expensive models. This can be used to produce better models that can be run on devices with low computational resources. Our method is flexible, we can distill knowledge from teachers with arbitrary network architectures to arbitrary student networks. Our empirical results show that MIMKD outperforms competing approaches across a wide range of student-teacher pairs with different capacities, with different architectures, and when student networks are with extremely low capacity. We are able to obtain 74.55% accuracy on CIFAR100 with a ShufflenetV2 from a baseline accuracy of 69.8% by distilling knowledge from ResNet-50. On Imagenet we improve a ResNet-18 network from 68.88% to 70.32% accuracy (1.44%+) using a ResNet-34 teacher network.