Current knowledge distillation methods for semantic segmentation focus on guiding the student to imitate the teacher's knowledge within homogeneous architectures.
A generic knowledge distillation method for semantic segmentation from a heterogeneous perspective called HeteroAKD is proposed.
HeteroAKD eliminates the influence of architecture-specific information by projecting intermediate features of the teacher and student into an aligned logits space.
HeteroAKD outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods in facilitating distillation between heterogeneous architectures.