# Knowledge Amalgamation for Object Detection with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03187/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06295/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Training-Free Pretrained Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01753/) (2024)
- [SS-MAE: Spatial-Spectral Masked Auto-Encoder for Multi-Source Remote Sensing Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04442/) (2023)
- [KA2ER: Knowledge Adaptive Amalgamation of ExpeRts for Medical Images Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21085/) (2024)
- [Rotation center identification based on geometric relationships for rotary motion deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04171/) (2024)
- [Reinforced Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21272/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge amalgamation (KA) is a novel deep model reusing task aiming to transfer knowledge from several well-trained teachers to a multi-talented and compact student. Currently, most of these approaches are tailored for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, there is a tendency that transformers, with a completely different architecture, are starting to challenge the domination of CNNs in many computer vision tasks. Nevertheless, directly applying the previous KA methods to transformers leads to severe performance degradation. In this work, we explore a more effective KA scheme for transformer-based object detection models. Specifically, considering the architecture characteristics of transformers, we propose to dissolve the KA into two aspects: sequence-level amalgamation (SA) and task-level amalgamation (TA). In particular, a hint is generated within the sequence-level amalgamation by concatenating teacher sequences instead of redundantly aggregating them to a fixed-size one as previous KA works. Besides, the student learns heterogeneous detection tasks through soft targets with efficiency in the task-level amalgamation. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and COCO have unfolded that the sequence-level amalgamation significantly boosts the performance of students, while the previous methods impair the students. Moreover, the transformer-based students excel in learning amalgamated knowledge, as they have mastered heterogeneous detection tasks rapidly and achieved superior or at least comparable performance to those of the teachers in their specializations.