Large vision models provide useful representations for remote-sensing segmentation but are often too expensive for deployment at the satellite or field edge. Existing feature-level distillation methods also tend to assume similar teacher and student architectures and often stop feature alignment when task training begins. We introduce JEDI (JEPA-to-Edge Distillation), a two-stage framework that transfers representations from a large I-JEPA Vision Transformer teacher to a compact SegFormer student. First, JEDI aligns the student's terminal representation with the teacher's token space using cross-architecture projection and spatial alignment. It then jointly optimizes supervised segmentation, temperature-scaled response distillation, and persistent feature alignment throughout task adaptation. On CalCROP21, JEDI-B0 achieves 68.0 mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) with 4.04M parameters, improving over the standalone student by 16.0 points and coming within 2.0 points of the 70.0 mIoU achieved by the 639M-parameter teacher. We evaluate SegFormer B0, B1, and B2 students with 4.04M, 14.33M, and 28M parameters, respectively. Across all three variants, JEDI consistently outperforms response-, structure-, channel-, and relational-distillation baselines under the same teacher-student setting. These results show that persistent representation alignment is especially valuable under aggressive compression, substantially reducing model size and computation while preserving segmentation performance.
Geospatial foundation models can provide strong flood-segmentation performance, but their size limits deployment on memory-constrained edge hardware. We distill a 300-million-parameter Prithvi-EO-2.0 teacher, fine-tuned on the 252 manually labeled Sen1Floods11 training scenes, into a 0.7-million-parameter EfficientViT-B0 student. The teacher supervises additional unlabeled Sentinel-2 imagery, allowing the student training set to grow without new manual annotations. At the matched budget of 252 scenes, teacher-supervised training is competitive with direct training and improves STURM-Flood performance across tested configurations; a geometry-matched control shows that label source alone does not explain the difference. Scaling the teacher-supervised pool to 2,500 scenes narrows the remaining student--teacher gap: the float student reaches 0.787 water intersection over union on the Sen1Floods11 test split against 0.822 for the teacher, matches the teacher on STURM-Flood under our evaluation protocol, and remains below it on WorldFloods-v2. After activation replacement and quantization-aware training, the student runs as a 1.5-megabyte 8-bit integer (INT8) TensorRT engine on a Jetson Xavier NX at 5.57 milliseconds of graphics processing unit (GPU) compute per 512-by-512 image, with approximately 14 megabytes of runtime device memory. A fixed modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) threshold is competitive with both models on the two clean external benchmarks, so we interpret those benchmarks as generalization tests rather than as evidence of learned-model superiority over a spectral rule. The results support the conclusion: foundation-model supervision can amplify a fixed manual annotation budget into a substantially larger training set and yield a compact, deployable edge model.
Fabian Schmalstieg, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek
Large-scale vision foundation models have driven substantial gains on dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, but their size makes deployment impractical in resource-constrained settings, motivating knowledge distillation as a means of transferring their capabilities to lightweight student networks. However, modern foundation teachers are predominantly transformer-based that encode global context, whereas efficient students are typically convolutional networks with locally biased receptive fields. Existing distillation methods largely assume architectural homogeneity and rely on direct feature mimicry, which fails to bridge this representational gap and neglects the structured spatial dependencies and discriminative organization required for accurate semantic segmentation. In this paper, we propose SWARD, a knowledge distillation framework that addresses this gap through two complementary mechanisms. First, we introduce a Multi-Scale Windowed Attention Distillation (MWAD) module that aligns teacher-student attention-based relations within stochastically shifted window partitions whose offsets are randomly resampled at every training iteration. This removes window boundary bias, and, combined with the multi-scale design, captures both short- and long-range spatial dependencies. Second, we introduce Prototype Discriminative Regularization (PDR), a loss that helps shape the student's feature distribution by enforcing inter-class separation and intra-class compactness, further sharpening the discriminative structure beyond what feature mimicry alone can produce under the student's reduced capacity. Experiments across different vision applications (i.e., urban scene parsing and medical image segmentation) show that SWARD achieves state-of-the-art performance.
The computational complexity of Transformers scales quadratically with the number of tokens, which significantly constrains the efficiency of vision models, particularly recent ViT-based foundation models in dense prediction tasks. Instance segmentation, a typical dense visual prediction task in the remote sensing field, faces similar challenges. In this paper, inspired by the recent advances of knowledge distillation in large language models, we introduce RS4D - a new remote sensing instance segmentation method with linear computational complexity, which addresses the inefficiency of long sequence modeling through distilled state space modeling (SSM). We propose an adaptive noise and masking knowledge distillation training method for pre-training lightweight SSM backbones, which effectively compresses knowledge from the vast self-attention space into a compact, dense linear state space. We also design a remote sensing image instance segmentation architecture based on this lightweight visual encoder, where we explore variants of three different backbones and two segmentation heads. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, including SSDD, WHU, and NWPU. Compared to ViT-based approaches, our proposed SSM backbone achieves an 8x reduction in parameters and a 9x reduction in FLOPs while maintaining comparable or superior accuracy to both ViT- and CNN-based instance segmentation methods. The implementation codes have been publicly available at https://github.com/QinzheYang/RS4D.