De-confounded Data-free Knowledge Distillation for Handling Distribution Shifts

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yuzheng, Yang, Dingkang, Chen, Zhaoyu, Liu, Yang, Liu, Siao, Zhang, Wenqiang, Zhang, Lihua, Qi, Lizhe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866913288768454656
author Wang, Yuzheng
Yang, Dingkang
Chen, Zhaoyu
Liu, Yang
Liu, Siao
Zhang, Wenqiang
Zhang, Lihua
Qi, Lizhe
author_facet Wang, Yuzheng
Yang, Dingkang
Chen, Zhaoyu
Liu, Yang
Liu, Siao
Zhang, Wenqiang
Zhang, Lihua
Qi, Lizhe
contents Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) is a promising task to train high-performance small models to enhance actual deployment without relying on the original training data. Existing methods commonly avoid relying on private data by utilizing synthetic or sampled data. However, a long-overlooked issue is that the severe distribution shifts between their substitution and original data, which manifests as huge differences in the quality of images and class proportions. The harmful shifts are essentially the confounder that significantly causes performance bottlenecks. To tackle the issue, this paper proposes a novel perspective with causal inference to disentangle the student models from the impact of such shifts. By designing a customized causal graph, we first reveal the causalities among the variables in the DFKD task. Subsequently, we propose a Knowledge Distillation Causal Intervention (KDCI) framework based on the backdoor adjustment to de-confound the confounder. KDCI can be flexibly combined with most existing state-of-the-art baselines. Experiments in combination with six representative DFKD methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our KDCI, which can obviously help existing methods under almost all settings, \textit{e.g.}, improving the baseline by up to 15.54\% accuracy on the CIFAR-100 dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_19539
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle De-confounded Data-free Knowledge Distillation for Handling Distribution Shifts
Wang, Yuzheng
Yang, Dingkang
Chen, Zhaoyu
Liu, Yang
Liu, Siao
Zhang, Wenqiang
Zhang, Lihua
Qi, Lizhe
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) is a promising task to train high-performance small models to enhance actual deployment without relying on the original training data. Existing methods commonly avoid relying on private data by utilizing synthetic or sampled data. However, a long-overlooked issue is that the severe distribution shifts between their substitution and original data, which manifests as huge differences in the quality of images and class proportions. The harmful shifts are essentially the confounder that significantly causes performance bottlenecks. To tackle the issue, this paper proposes a novel perspective with causal inference to disentangle the student models from the impact of such shifts. By designing a customized causal graph, we first reveal the causalities among the variables in the DFKD task. Subsequently, we propose a Knowledge Distillation Causal Intervention (KDCI) framework based on the backdoor adjustment to de-confound the confounder. KDCI can be flexibly combined with most existing state-of-the-art baselines. Experiments in combination with six representative DFKD methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our KDCI, which can obviously help existing methods under almost all settings, \textit{e.g.}, improving the baseline by up to 15.54\% accuracy on the CIFAR-100 dataset.
title De-confounded Data-free Knowledge Distillation for Handling Distribution Shifts
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19539