S2SD: Simultaneous Similarity-based Self-Distillation for Deep Metric Learning

17 Sep 2020  ·  Karsten Roth, Timo Milbich, Björn Ommer, Joseph Paul Cohen, Marzyeh Ghassemi ·

Deep Metric Learning (DML) provides a crucial tool for visual similarity and zero-shot applications by learning generalizing embedding spaces, although recent work in DML has shown strong performance saturation across training objectives. However, generalization capacity is known to scale with the embedding space dimensionality. Unfortunately, high dimensional embeddings also create higher retrieval cost for downstream applications. To remedy this, we propose \emph{Simultaneous Similarity-based Self-distillation (S2SD). S2SD extends DML with knowledge distillation from auxiliary, high-dimensional embedding and feature spaces to leverage complementary context during training while retaining test-time cost and with negligible changes to the training time. Experiments and ablations across different objectives and standard benchmarks show S2SD offers notable improvements of up to 7% in Recall@1, while also setting a new state-of-the-art. Code available at https://github.com/MLforHealth/S2SD.

PDF Abstract

Results from the Paper


Ranked #10 on Metric Learning on CARS196 (using extra training data)

     Get a GitHub badge
Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Metric Learning CARS196 ResNet50 + S2SD R@1 89.5 # 10
Metric Learning CUB-200-2011 ResNet50 + S2SD R@1 70.1 # 12
Metric Learning Stanford Online Products ResNet50 + S2SD R@1 81.0 # 19

Methods