Make a Strong Teacher with Label Assistance: A Novel Knowledge Distillation Approach for Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a novel knowledge distillation approach for the semantic segmentation task. Unlike previous methods that rely on power-trained teachers or other modalities to provide additional knowledge, our approach does not require complex teacher models or information from extra sensors. Specifically, for the teacher model training, we propose to noise the label and then incorporate it into input to effectively boost the lightweight teacher performance. To ensure the robustness of the teacher model against the introduced noise, we propose a dual-path consistency training strategy featuring a distance loss between the outputs of two paths. For the student model training, we keep it consistent with the standard distillation for simplicity. Our approach not only boosts the efficacy of knowledge distillation but also increases the flexibility in selecting teacher and student models. To demonstrate the advantages of our Label Assisted Distillation (LAD) method, we conduct extensive experiments on five challenging datasets including Cityscapes, ADE20K, PASCAL-VOC, COCO-Stuff 10K, and COCO-Stuff 164K, five popular models: FCN, PSPNet, DeepLabV3, STDC, and OCRNet, and results show the effectiveness and generalization of our approach. We posit that incorporating labels into the input, as demonstrated in our work, will provide valuable insights into related fields. Code is available at https://github.com/skyshoumeng/Label_Assisted_Distillation.

Towards Open-set Camera 3D Object Detection

Traditional camera 3D object detectors are typically trained to recognize a predefined set of known object classes. In real-world scenarios, these detectors may encounter unknown objects outside the training categories and fail to identify them correctly. To address this gap, we present OS-Det3D (Open-set Camera 3D Object Detection), a two-stage training framework enhancing the ability of camera 3D detectors to identify both known and unknown objects. The framework involves our proposed 3D Object Discovery Network (ODN3D), which is specifically trained using geometric cues such as the location and scale of 3D boxes to discover general 3D objects. ODN3D is trained in a class-agnostic manner, and the provided 3D object region proposals inherently come with data noise. To boost accuracy in identifying unknown objects, we introduce a Joint Objectness Selection (JOS) module. JOS selects the pseudo ground truth for unknown objects from the 3D object region proposals of ODN3D by combining the ODN3D objectness and camera feature attention objectness. Experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in enabling camera 3D detectors to successfully identify unknown objects while also improving their performance on known objects.