Increasingly expensive training of ever larger models such as Vision Transfomers motivate reusing the vast library of already trained state-of-the-art networks. However, their latency, high computational costs and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment, especially on resource-constrained hardware. While structured pruning methods can reduce these factors, they often require costly retraining, sometimes for up to hundreds of epochs, or even training from scratch to recover the lost accuracy resulting from the structural modifications. Maintaining the provided performance of trained models after structured pruning and thereby avoiding extensive retraining remains a challenge. To solve this, we introduce Variance-Based Pruning, a simple and structured one-shot pruning technique for efficiently compressing networks, with minimal finetuning. Our approach first gathers activation statistics, which are then used to select neurons for pruning. Simultaneously the mean activations are integrated back into the model to preserve a high degree of performance. On ImageNet-1k recognition tasks, we demonstrate that directly after pruning DeiT-Base retains over 70% of its original performance and requires only 10 epochs of fine-tuning to regain 99% of the original accuracy while simultaneously reducing MACs by 35% and model size by 36%, thus speeding up the model by 1.44 times.

Token merging can effectively accelerate various vision systems by processing groups of similar tokens only once and sharing the results across them. However, existing token grouping methods are often ad hoc and random, disregarding the actual content of the samples. We show that preserving high-information tokens during merging—those essential for semantic fidelity and structural details—significantly improves sample quality, producing finer details and more coherent, realistic generations. Despite being simple and intuitive, this approach remains underexplored.To do so, we propose an importance-based token merging method that prioritizes the most critical tokens in computational resource allocation, leveraging readily available importance scores, such as those from classifier-free guidance in diffusion models. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods across multiple applications, including text-to-image synthesis, multi-view image generation, and video generation with various model architectures such as Stable Diffusion, Zero123++, AnimateDiff, or PixArt-$\alpha$.

Recent learned image compression (LIC) models have achieved remarkable rate-distortion (RD) performance, yet their high computational complexity severely limits practical deployment. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel Stage-wise Modular Distillation framework, SMoDi, which efficiently compresses LIC models while preserving RD performance. This framework treats each stage of LIC models as an independent sub-task, mirroring the teacher model’s task decomposition to student, thereby simplifying knowledge transfer.We identify two crucial factors determining the effectiveness of knowledge distillation: student model construction and loss function design. Specifically, we first propose Teacher-Guided Student Model Construction, a pruning-like method ensuring architectural consistency between teacher and student models. Next, we introduce Implicit End-to-end Supervision, facilitating adaptive energy compaction and bitrate regularization.Based on these insights, we develop KDIC, a lightweight student model derived from the state-of-the-art S2CFormer model. Experimental results demonstrate that KDIC achieves top-tier RD performance with significantly reduced computational complexity. To our knowledge, this work is among the first successful applications of knowledge distillation to learned image compression.

Diffusion models have been applied to 3D LiDAR scene completion due to their strong training stability and high completion quality.However, the slow sampling speed limits the practical application of diffusion-based scene completion models since autonomous vehicles require an efficient perception of surrounding environments. This paper proposes a novel distillation method tailored for 3D LiDAR scene completion models, dubbed $\textbf{ScoreLiDAR}$, which achieves efficient yet high-quality scene completion.ScoreLiDAR enables the distilled model to sample in significantly fewer steps after distillation.To improve completion quality, we also introduce a novel $\textbf{Structural Loss}$, which encourages the distilled model to capture the geometric structure of the 3D LiDAR scene.The loss contains a scene-wise term constraining the holistic structure and a point-wise term constraining the key landmark points and their relative configuration.Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScoreLiDAR significantly accelerates the completion time from 30.55 to 5.37 seconds per frame ($>$5$\times$) on SemanticKITTI and achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art 3D LiDAR scene completion models.

Dataset distillation or condensation aims to condense a large-scale training dataset into a much smaller synthetic one such that the training performance of distilled and original sets on neural networks are similar. Although the number of training samples can be reduced substantially, current state-of-the-art methods heavily rely on enormous soft labels to achieve satisfactory performance. As a result, the required storage can be comparable even to original datasets, especially for large-scale ones. To solve this problem, instead of storing these heavy labels, we propose a novel label-lightening framework termed HeLlO aiming at effective image-to-label projectors, with which synthetic labels can be directly generated online from synthetic images. Specifically, to construct such projectors, we leverage prior knowledge in open-source foundation models, e.g., CLIP, and introduce a LoRA-like fine-tuning strategy to mitigate the gap between pre-trained and target distributions, so that original models for soft-label generation can be distilled into a group of low-rank matrices. Moreover, an effective image optimization method is proposed to further mitigate the potential error between the original and distilled label generators. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly reduces the storage cost to merely 0.001% compared to full soft-label storage methods while achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art dataset distillation methods on large-scale datasets. Our code will be available.