Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in image/video object segmentation across many domains, but its large encoder makes it challenging for resource-constrained devices or real-time applications. One solution to this problem is to carry out knowledge distillation from the bulky encoder to a lightweight encoder, but this can result in degraded performance. In this work, we investigate multi-teacher distillation to mitigate performance degradation for distilled segmentation models. Using several foundation teacher models, our multi-teacher distilled models achieve 3.2 times speedup during end-to-end inference compared to SAM2 while achieving the best results of 74.4 and 71.1 (72.1 and 69.6 for single-teacher distillation) mIoU on the COCO and LVIS image segmentation datasets, as well as showing competitive results on video segmentation. Our results show that multi-teacher distillation offers a powerful solution for efficient image/video segmentation, while also maintaining compelling performance.

Conventional Time Series Classification (TSC) methods are often black boxes that obscure inherent interpretation of their decision-making processes. In this work, we leverage Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) to overcome this issue, and propose a new framework called MILLET: Multiple Instance Learning for Locally Explainable Time series classification. We apply MILLET to existing deep learning TSC models and show how they become inherently interpretable without compromising (and in some cases, even improving) predictive performance. We evaluate MILLET on 85 UCR TSC datasets and also present a novel synthetic dataset that is specially designed to facilitate interpretability evaluation. On these datasets, we show MILLET produces sparse explanations quickly that are of higher quality than other well-known interpretability methods. To the best of our knowledge, our work with MILLET is the first to develop general MIL methods for TSC and apply them to an extensive variety of domains.