用视觉变压器教小卷积模型识作物病叶,效率提升百倍
AgriKD: Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Leaf Disease Classification

- 跨架构知识蒸馏,从ViT向轻量CNN传递多层级知识
- 模型参数缩小172倍,推理延迟降低18-22倍,精度几乎无损
- 支持多种边缘部署格式,已在真实设备上实现实时推理
自动化叶片病害分类对资源受限田间环境的早期病害检测至关重要。视觉变换器(ViTs)通过建模长程依赖和类间关系具备强表示能力,但其高计算成本使其难以在边缘设备部署。现有方法难以有效将此类丰富表征迁移至轻量级模型。本文提出AgriKD,一种面向高效边缘部署的跨架构知识蒸馏框架,将视觉变换器(ViT)教师模型的知识迁移至紧凑的卷积神经网络学生模型。为弥合Transformer与CNN之间的表征差距,该方法在输出、特征和关系三个层次集成多重蒸馏目标,分别捕捉教师模型的不同知识维度,使学生模型更好地保留和利用由Transformer生成的全局表征。在多个叶病数据集上的实验表明,蒸馏后学生模型性能接近教师模型,同时显著提升效率:模型参数减少约172倍,计算成本降低47.57倍,推理延迟降低18-22倍。此外,优化后的模型被部署于ONNX、TFLite Float16和TensorRT FP16等多种运行时格式,保持一致预测性能且精度下降可忽略。在NVIDIA Jetson边缘设备及移动端应用的真实部署验证了其可靠性,实现了实时推理,凸显AgriKD在资源受限环境下的农业智能应用可行性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automated leaf disease classification is critical for early disease detection in resource-constrained field environments. Vision Transformers (ViTs) provide strong representation capability by modeling long-range dependencies and inter-class relationships; however, their high computational cost makes them impractical for deployment on edge devices. As a result, existing approaches struggle to effectively transfer these rich representations to lightweight models. This paper introduces AgriKD, a cross-architecture knowledge distillation framework for efficient edge deployment, which transfers knowledge from a Vision Transformer (ViT) teacher to a compact convolutional student model. To bridge the representational gap between Transformer and CNN architectures, the proposed approach integrates multiple distillation objectives at the output, feature, and relational levels, where each objective captures a different aspect of the teacher knowledge. This enables the student model to better preserve and utilize transformer-derived global representations. Experiments on multiple leaf disease datasets show that the distilled student achieves performance comparable to the teacher while significantly improving efficiency, reducing model parameters by approximately 172 times, computational cost by 47.57 times, and inference latency by 18-22 times. Furthermore, the optimized model is deployed across multiple runtime formats, including ONNX, TFLite Float16, and TensorRT FP16, achieving consistent predictive performance with negligible accuracy degradation. Real-world deployment on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices and a mobile application demonstrates reliable real-time inference, highlighting the practicality of AgriKD for AI-powered agricultural applications in resource-constrained environments.
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