The **Spatial-Channel Token Distillation** method is proposed to improve the spatial and channel mixing from a novel knowledge distillation (KD) perspective. To be specific, we design a special KD mechanism for MLP-like Vision Models called Spatial-channel Token Distillation (STD), which improves the information mixing in both the spatial and channel dimensions of MLP blocks. Instead of modifying the mixing operations themselves, STD adds spatial and channel tokens to image patches. After forward propagation, the tokens are concatenated for distillation with the teachers’ responses as targets. Each token works as an aggregator of its dimension. The objective of them is to encourage each mixing operation to extract maximal task-related information from their specific dimension.

Despite the tantalizing success in a broad of vision tasks, transformers have not yet demonstrated on-par ability as ConvNets in high-resolution image generative modeling. In this paper, we seek to explore using pure transformers to build a generative adversarial network for high-resolution image synthesis. To this end, we believe that local attention is crucial to strike the balance between computational efficiency and modeling capacity. Hence, the proposed generator adopts Swin transformer in a style-based architecture. To achieve a larger receptive field, we propose double attention which simultaneously leverages the context of the local and the shifted windows, leading to improved generation quality. Moreover, we show that offering the knowledge of the absolute position that has been lost in window-based transformers greatly benefits the generation quality. The proposed StyleSwin is scalable to high resolutions, with both the coarse geometry and fine structures benefit from the strong expressivity of transformers. However, blocking artifacts occur during high-resolution synthesis because performing the local attention in a block-wise manner may break the spatial coherency. To solve this, we empirically investigate various solutions, among which we find that employing a wavelet discriminator to examine the spectral discrepancy effectively suppresses the artifacts. Extensive experiments show the superiority over prior transformer-based GANs, especially on high resolutions, e.g., 1024x1024. The StyleSwin, without complex training strategies, excels over StyleGAN on CelebA-HQ 1024x1024, and achieves on-par performance on FFHQ 1024x1024, proving the promise of using transformers for high-resolution image generation.

StyleSwin

Spatial-Channel Token Distillation for Vision MLPs

ERNIE is a transformer-based model consisting of two stacked modules: 1) textual encoder and 2) knowledgeable encoder, which is responsible to integrate extra token-oriented knowledge information into textual information. This layer consists of stacked aggregators, designed for encoding both tokens and entities as well as fusing their heterogeneous features. To integrate this layer of enhancing representations via knowledge, a special pre-training task is adopted for ERNIE - it involves randomly masking token-entity alignments and training the model to predict all corresponding entities based on aligned tokens (aka denoising entity auto-encoder).

Source	Spatial-Channel Token Distillation for Vision MLPs
Year	2000
Data Source	CC BY-SA - https://paperswithcode.com