SDPose: Tokenized Pose Estimation via Circulation-Guide Self-Distillation
<|reference_start|>SDPose: Tokenized Pose Estimation via Circulation-Guide Self-Distillation: 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.<|reference_end|>
@article{chen2024sdpose:,
    title={SDPose: Tokenized Pose Estimation via Circulation-Guide
  Self-Distillation},
    author={Sichen Chen, Yingyi Zhang, Siming Huang, Ran Yi, Ke Fan, Ruixin Zhang,
  Peixian Chen, Jun Wang, Shouhong Ding, Lizhuang Ma},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.03518},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.03518},
    primaryClass={cs.CV}
}