Understanding the Role of the Projector in Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Miles, Roy, Mikolajczyk, Krystian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Miles, Roy
Mikolajczyk, Krystian
author_facet Miles, Roy
Mikolajczyk, Krystian
contents In this paper we revisit the efficacy of knowledge distillation as a function matching and metric learning problem. In doing so we verify three important design decisions, namely the normalisation, soft maximum function, and projection layers as key ingredients. We theoretically show that the projector implicitly encodes information on past examples, enabling relational gradients for the student. We then show that the normalisation of representations is tightly coupled with the training dynamics of this projector, which can have a large impact on the students performance. Finally, we show that a simple soft maximum function can be used to address any significant capacity gap problems. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that using these insights can lead to superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques, despite being much more computationally efficient. In particular, we obtain these results across image classification (CIFAR100 and ImageNet), object detection (COCO2017), and on more difficult distillation objectives, such as training data efficient transformers, whereby we attain a 77.2% top-1 accuracy with DeiT-Ti on ImageNet. Code and models are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_11098
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding the Role of the Projector in Knowledge Distillation
Miles, Roy
Mikolajczyk, Krystian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
In this paper we revisit the efficacy of knowledge distillation as a function matching and metric learning problem. In doing so we verify three important design decisions, namely the normalisation, soft maximum function, and projection layers as key ingredients. We theoretically show that the projector implicitly encodes information on past examples, enabling relational gradients for the student. We then show that the normalisation of representations is tightly coupled with the training dynamics of this projector, which can have a large impact on the students performance. Finally, we show that a simple soft maximum function can be used to address any significant capacity gap problems. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that using these insights can lead to superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques, despite being much more computationally efficient. In particular, we obtain these results across image classification (CIFAR100 and ImageNet), object detection (COCO2017), and on more difficult distillation objectives, such as training data efficient transformers, whereby we attain a 77.2% top-1 accuracy with DeiT-Ti on ImageNet. Code and models are publicly available.
title Understanding the Role of the Projector in Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11098