Gradient-Guided Knowledge Distillation for Object Detectors

Deep learning models have demonstrated remarkable success in object detection, yet their complexity and computational intensity pose a barrier to deploying them in real-world applications (e.g., self-driving perception). Knowledge Distillation (KD) is an effective way to derive efficient models. However, only a small number of KD methods tackle object detection. Also, most of them focus on mimicking the plain features of the teacher model but rarely consider how the features contribute to the final detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for knowledge distillation in object detection, named Gradient-guided Knowledge Distillation (GKD). Our GKD uses gradient information to identify and assign more weights to features that significantly impact the detection loss, allowing the student to learn the most relevant features from the teacher. Furthermore, we present bounding-box-aware multi-grained feature imitation (BMFI) to further improve the KD performance. Experiments on the KITTI and COCO-Traffic datasets demonstrate our method’s efficacy in knowledge distillation for object detection. On one-stage and two-stage detectors, our GKD-BMFI leads to an average of 5.1% and 3.8% mAP improvement, respectively, beating various state-of-the-art KD methods. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/lanqz7766/GKD.