Empowering Teachers with Enhanced Knowledge via Variable Scale Distillation Framework

18 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: knowledge distillation, hierarchical distillation, self-supervision, cross-scale image processing.
Abstract: Knowledge distillation, a widely used model compression technique, enables a smaller student network to replicate the performance of a larger teacher network by transferring knowledge, typically in the form of softened class probabilities or feature representations. However, current approaches often fail to maximize the teacher’s feature extraction capabilities, as they treat the semantic information transfer between teacher and student as equal. This paper presents a novel framework that addresses this limitation by enhancing the teacher’s learning process through the Variable Scale Distillation Framework. Central to our approach is the Rescale Block, which preserves scale consistency during hierarchical distillation, allowing the teacher to extract richer, more informative features. In extensive experiments on the CIFAR100 dataset, our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art distillation techniques, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 2.12\%. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in fully leveraging the teacher’s capacity to guide the student, pushing the boundaries of knowledge distillation.
Primary Area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning
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Submission Number: 1540
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