Wasserstein Distance Rivals Kullback-Leibler Divergence for Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lv, Jiaming, Yang, Haoyuan, Li, Peihua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Lv, Jiaming
Yang, Haoyuan
Li, Peihua
author_facet Lv, Jiaming
Yang, Haoyuan
Li, Peihua
contents Since pioneering work of Hinton et al., knowledge distillation based on Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KL-Div) has been predominant, and recently its variants have achieved compelling performance. However, KL-Div only compares probabilities of the corresponding category between the teacher and student while lacking a mechanism for cross-category comparison. Besides, KL-Div is problematic when applied to intermediate layers, as it cannot handle non-overlapping distributions and is unaware of geometry of the underlying manifold. To address these downsides, we propose a methodology of Wasserstein Distance (WD) based knowledge distillation. Specifically, we propose a logit distillation method called WKD-L based on discrete WD, which performs cross-category comparison of probabilities and thus can explicitly leverage rich interrelations among categories. Moreover, we introduce a feature distillation method called WKD-F, which uses a parametric method for modeling feature distributions and adopts continuous WD for transferring knowledge from intermediate layers. Comprehensive evaluations on image classification and object detection have shown (1) for logit distillation WKD-L outperforms very strong KL-Div variants; (2) for feature distillation WKD-F is superior to the KL-Div counterparts and state-of-the-art competitors. The source code is available at https://peihuali.org/WKD
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08139
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wasserstein Distance Rivals Kullback-Leibler Divergence for Knowledge Distillation
Lv, Jiaming
Yang, Haoyuan
Li, Peihua
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Since pioneering work of Hinton et al., knowledge distillation based on Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KL-Div) has been predominant, and recently its variants have achieved compelling performance. However, KL-Div only compares probabilities of the corresponding category between the teacher and student while lacking a mechanism for cross-category comparison. Besides, KL-Div is problematic when applied to intermediate layers, as it cannot handle non-overlapping distributions and is unaware of geometry of the underlying manifold. To address these downsides, we propose a methodology of Wasserstein Distance (WD) based knowledge distillation. Specifically, we propose a logit distillation method called WKD-L based on discrete WD, which performs cross-category comparison of probabilities and thus can explicitly leverage rich interrelations among categories. Moreover, we introduce a feature distillation method called WKD-F, which uses a parametric method for modeling feature distributions and adopts continuous WD for transferring knowledge from intermediate layers. Comprehensive evaluations on image classification and object detection have shown (1) for logit distillation WKD-L outperforms very strong KL-Div variants; (2) for feature distillation WKD-F is superior to the KL-Div counterparts and state-of-the-art competitors. The source code is available at https://peihuali.org/WKD
title Wasserstein Distance Rivals Kullback-Leibler Divergence for Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08139