Identity-Aware Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Facial Attribute Recognition

Facial attribute recognition (FAR) is an important and yet challenging multi-label learning task in computer vision. Existing FAR methods have achieved promising performance with the development of deep learning. However, they usually suffer from prohibitive computational and memory costs. In this paper, we propose an identity-aware contrastive knowledge distillation method, termed ICKD, to compress the FAR model. A nonlinear weight-sharing mapping (NWSM) mechanism is firstly designed to avoid the difficulty of directly matching features of the teacher and student networks due to the lower representation ability of the student network. Furthermore, an identity-aware contrastive distillation (ICD) loss is employed to guide the student network to effectively learn the mutual relations between samples with multiple attributes. In addition, an adjustable ladder distillation (ALD) loss is developed to automatically adjust the importance of different distillation points with the progress of training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance of student networks and outperforms the existing FAR methods on the public challenging datasets.