{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/generic-to-specific-distillation-of-masked","title":"Generic-to-Specific Distillation of Masked Autoencoders","arxiv_id":"2302.14771","date":"2023-02-28","proceeding":"CVPR 2023 1","authors":["Wei Huang","Zhiliang Peng","Li Dong","Furu Wei","Jianbin Jiao","Qixiang Ye"],"abstract":"Large vision Transformers (ViTs) driven by self-supervised pre-training mechanisms achieved unprecedented progress. Lightweight ViT models limited by the model capacity, however, benefit little from those pre-training mechanisms. Knowledge distillation defines a paradigm to transfer representations from large (teacher) models to small (student) ones. However, the conventional single-stage distillation easily gets stuck on task-specific transfer, failing to retain the task-agnostic knowledge crucial for model generalization. In this study, we propose generic-to-specific distillation (G2SD), to tap the potential of small ViT models under the supervision of large models pre-trained by masked autoencoders. In generic distillation, decoder of the small model is encouraged to align feature predictions with hidden representations of the large model, so that task-agnostic knowledge can be transferred. In specific distillation, predictions of the small model are constrained to be consistent with those of the large model, to transfer task-specific features which guarantee task performance. With G2SD, the vanilla ViT-Small model respectively achieves 98.7%, 98.1% and 99.3% the performance of its teacher (ViT-Base) for image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, setting a solid baseline for two-stage vision distillation. Code will be available at https://github.com/pengzhiliang/G2SD.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.14771v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.14771v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"generic-to-specific-distillation-of-masked","repo_url":"https://github.com/pengzhiliang/g2sd","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-1","task_name":"object-detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"},{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2302.14771","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2302.14771","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}