Efficient Audio-Visual Event Recognition via Knowledge Distillation and Dynamic INT8 Quantization of a Hybrid Cross-Attention Network

Parinaz Binandeh Dehaghani, Danilo Pena, A. Pedro Aguiar

Audio-visual event recognition (AVER) has achieved significant performance improvements through transformer-based multimodal architectures. However, the high computational complexity, large memory footprint, and inference cost of these models hinder their deployment on edge and resource-constrained devices. This paper presents an efficient compression framework for hybrid cross-attention-based audiovisual event recognition by combining architectural model compression, knowledge distillation, and dynamic INT8 quantization. A high-capacity teacher model integrates VideoMAE for visual representation learning, the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) for audio feature extraction, and a hybrid cross-attention fusion network for multimodal feature integration. A lightweight student model is constructed by reducing the hidden feature dimension, the number of attention heads, and the feedforward network size while preserving the overall network architecture. The student model is trained using knowledge distillation to effectively transfer discriminative knowledge from the teacher. Finally, dynamic INT8 post-training quantization is applied to further reduce the model size for efficient deployment. Experimental results on the Audio-Visual Event (AVE) dataset show that the proposed framework reduces the number of trainable parameters in the multimodal fusion module by 59.06%, with only a 2.14% decrease in classification accuracy compared with the teacher model. Furthermore, dynamic INT8 quantization reduces the model size from 10.71 MB to 2.04 MB while maintaining competitive recognition performance. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides an effective trade-off between recognition accuracy and computational efficiency, making it a promising solution for deployment on resource-constrained edge AI platforms.