SDPose: Tokenized Pose Estimation via Circulation-Guide Self-Distillation

TL;DR

SD-Pose, a new self-distillation method for improving the performance of small transformer-based models, is introduced based on a transformer module named Multi-Cycled Transformer based on multiple-cycled forwards to more fully exploit the potential of small model parameters.

Abstract

Recently, transformer-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art prediction quality on human pose estimation(HPE). Nonetheless, most of these top-performing transformer-based models are too computation-consuming and storage-demanding to deploy on edge computing platforms. Those transformer-based models that require fewer resources are prone to under-fitting due to their smaller scale and thus perform notably worse than their larger counterparts. Given this conundrum, we introduce SDPose, a new self-distillation method for improving the performance of small transformer-based models. To mitigate the problem of under-fitting, we design a transformer module named Multi-Cycled Transformer(MCT) based on multiple-cycled forwards to more fully exploit the potential of small model parameters. Further, in order to prevent the additional inference compute-consuming brought by MCT, we introduce a self-distillation scheme, extracting the knowledge from the MCT module to a naive forward model. Specifically, on the MSCOCO validation dataset, SDPose-T obtains 69.7% mAP with 4.4M parameters and 1.8 GFLOPs. Furthermore, SDPose-S-V2 obtains 73.5% mAP on the MSCOCO validation dataset with 6.2M parameters and 4.7 GFLOPs, achieving a new state-of-the-art among predominant tiny neural network methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/MartyrPenink/SDPose.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Comparsions between other small models and our methods on MSCOCO validation dataset. Compared to other methods, our approach can significantly reduce the scale while maintaining the same performance, or greatly improve performance under the same scale.