Beyond Student: An Asymmetric Network for Neural Network Inheritance

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a powerful technique for model compression, enabling lightweight student networks to benefit from the performance of redundant teacher networks. However, the inherent capacity gap often limits the performance of student networks. Inspired by the expressiveness of pretrained teacher networks, a compelling research question arises: is there a type of network that can not only inherit the teacher's structure but also maximize the inheritance of its knowledge? Furthermore, how does the performance of such an inheriting network compare to that of student networks, all benefiting from the same teacher network? To further explore this question, we propose InherNet, a neural network inheritance method that performs asymmetric low-rank decomposition on the teacher's weights and reconstructs a lightweight yet expressive network without significant architectural disruption. By leveraging Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization to ensure the inheritance of principal knowledge, InherNet effectively balances depth, width, and compression efficiency. Experimental results across unimodal and multimodal tasks demonstrate that InherNet achieves higher performance compared to student networks of similar parameter sizes. Our findings reveal a promising direction for future research in efficient model compression beyond traditional distillation.

Collaborative Representation Learning for Alignment of Tactile, Language, and Vision Modalities

Tactile sensing offers rich and complementary information to vision and language, enabling robots to perceive fine-grained object properties. However, existing tactile sensors lack standardization, leading to redundant features that hinder cross-sensor generalization. Moreover, existing methods fail to fully integrate the intermediate communication among tactile, language, and vision modalities. To address this, we propose TLV-CoRe, a CLIP-based Tactile-Language-Vision Collaborative Representation learning method. TLV-CoRe introduces a Sensor-Aware Modulator to unify tactile features across different sensors and employs tactile-irrelevant decoupled learning to disentangle irrelevant tactile features. Additionally, a Unified Bridging Adapter is introduced to enhance tri-modal interaction within the shared representation space. To fairly evaluate the effectiveness of tactile models, we further propose the RSS evaluation framework, focusing on Robustness, Synergy, and Stability across different methods. Experimental results demonstrate that TLV-CoRe significantly improves sensor-agnostic representation learning and cross-modal alignment, offering a new direction for multimodal tactile representation.

PSMGD: Periodic Stochastic Multi-Gradient Descent for Fast Multi-Objective Optimization

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) lies at the core of many machine learning (ML) applications that involve multiple, potentially conflicting objectives (e.g., multi-task learning, multi-objective reinforcement learning, among many others). Despite the long history of MOO, recent years have witnessed a surge in interest within the ML community in the development of gradient manipulation algorithms for MOO, thanks to the availability of gradient information in many ML problems. However, existing gradient manipulation methods for MOO often suffer from long training times, primarily due to the need for computing dynamic weights by solving an additional optimization problem to determine a common descent direction that can decrease all objectives simultaneously. To address this challenge, we propose a new and efficient algorithm called Periodic Stochastic Multi-Gradient Descent (PSMGD) to accelerate MOO. PSMGD is motivated by the key observation that dynamic weights across objectives exhibit small changes under minor updates over short intervals during the optimization process. Consequently, our PSMGD algorithm is designed to periodically compute these dynamic weights and utilizes them repeatedly, thereby effectively reducing the computational overload. Theoretically, we prove that PSMGD can achieve state-of-the-art convergence rates for strongly-convex, general convex, and non-convex functions. Additionally, we introduce a new computational complexity measure, termed backpropagation complexity, and demonstrate that PSMGD could achieve an objective-independent backpropagation complexity. Through extensive experiments, we verify that PSMGD can provide comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art MOO algorithms while significantly reducing training time.