Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Guo, Yong, Zhang, Shulian, Pan, Haolin, Liu, Jing, Zhang, Yulun, Chen, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04140
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909337061949440
author Guo, Yong
Zhang, Shulian
Pan, Haolin
Liu, Jing
Zhang, Yulun
Chen, Jian
author_facet Guo, Yong
Zhang, Shulian
Pan, Haolin
Liu, Jing
Zhang, Yulun
Chen, Jian
contents Knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a compact student counterpart, often coming with a significant performance gap between them. We find that a too-large performance gap can hamper the training process, which is also verified in recent studies. To address this, we propose a Gap Preserving Distillation (GPD) method that trains an additional dynamic teacher model from scratch along with training the student to bridge this gap. In this way, it becomes possible to maintain a reasonable performance gap between teacher and student during the whole distillation process. To further strengthen distillation from the dynamic teacher to the student, we develop a hard strategy by enforcing them to share parameters and encouraging parameter inheritance. Besides hard strategy, we also build the soft bidirectional mappings between them which are built on an Inverse Reparameterization (IR) method and a Channel-Branch Reparameterization (CBR) strategy. We highlight that our IR is able to initialize a larger dynamic teacher with an arbitrary expansion ratio, while preserving exactly the same accuracy as the given student model. In this way, it guarantees that the dynamic teacher and student start from the same point and avoid a too large gap in early stage of training. As for our CBR, with parameter-sharing, it directly extracts an effective student model from the well-learned dynamic teacher without any post-training, making our method highly flexible for model deployment. In the experiments, GPD significantly outperforms existing distillation methods on top of both CNNs and transformers architectures, achieving up to 1.58% accuracy improvement. Interestingly, GPD also generalizes well to the scenarios without a pre-trained teacher, including training from scratch and fine-tuning, yielding a large improvement of 1.80% and 0.89% on ResNet18, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_04140
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gap Preserving Distillation by Building Bidirectional Mappings with A Dynamic Teacher
Guo, Yong
Zhang, Shulian
Pan, Haolin
Liu, Jing
Zhang, Yulun
Chen, Jian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a compact student counterpart, often coming with a significant performance gap between them. We find that a too-large performance gap can hamper the training process, which is also verified in recent studies. To address this, we propose a Gap Preserving Distillation (GPD) method that trains an additional dynamic teacher model from scratch along with training the student to bridge this gap. In this way, it becomes possible to maintain a reasonable performance gap between teacher and student during the whole distillation process. To further strengthen distillation from the dynamic teacher to the student, we develop a hard strategy by enforcing them to share parameters and encouraging parameter inheritance. Besides hard strategy, we also build the soft bidirectional mappings between them which are built on an Inverse Reparameterization (IR) method and a Channel-Branch Reparameterization (CBR) strategy. We highlight that our IR is able to initialize a larger dynamic teacher with an arbitrary expansion ratio, while preserving exactly the same accuracy as the given student model. In this way, it guarantees that the dynamic teacher and student start from the same point and avoid a too large gap in early stage of training. As for our CBR, with parameter-sharing, it directly extracts an effective student model from the well-learned dynamic teacher without any post-training, making our method highly flexible for model deployment. In the experiments, GPD significantly outperforms existing distillation methods on top of both CNNs and transformers architectures, achieving up to 1.58% accuracy improvement. Interestingly, GPD also generalizes well to the scenarios without a pre-trained teacher, including training from scratch and fine-tuning, yielding a large improvement of 1.80% and 0.89% on ResNet18, respectively.
title Gap Preserving Distillation by Building Bidirectional Mappings with A Dynamic Teacher
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04140