Balance Divergence for Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Qi, Yafei, Wang, Chen, Zhang, Zhaoning, Liu, Yaping, Zhang, Yongmin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Qi, Yafei
Wang, Chen
Zhang, Zhaoning
Liu, Yaping
Zhang, Yongmin
author_facet Qi, Yafei
Wang, Chen
Zhang, Zhaoning
Liu, Yaping
Zhang, Yongmin
contents Knowledge distillation has been widely adopted in computer vision task processing, since it can effectively enhance the performance of lightweight student networks by leveraging the knowledge transferred from cumbersome teacher networks. Most existing knowledge distillation methods utilize Kullback-Leibler divergence to mimic the logit output probabilities between the teacher network and the student network. Nonetheless, these methods may neglect the negative parts of the teacher's ''dark knowledge'' because the divergence calculations may ignore the effect of the minute probabilities from the teacher's logit output. This deficiency may lead to suboptimal performance in logit mimicry during the distillation process and result in an imbalance of information acquired by the student network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this imbalance and propose a novel method, named Balance Divergence Distillation. By introducing a compensatory operation using reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence, our method can improve the modeling of the extremely small values in the negative from the teacher and preserve the learning capacity for the positive. Furthermore, we test the impact of different temperature coefficients adjustments, which may conducted to further balance for knowledge transferring. We evaluate the proposed method on several computer vision tasks, including image classification and semantic segmentation. The evaluation results show that our method achieves an accuracy improvement of 1%~3% for lightweight students on both CIFAR-100 and ImageNet dataset, and a 4.55% improvement in mIoU for PSP-ResNet18 on the Cityscapes dataset. The experiments show that our method is a simple yet highly effective solution that can be smoothly applied to different knowledge distillation methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_07804
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Balance Divergence for Knowledge Distillation
Qi, Yafei
Wang, Chen
Zhang, Zhaoning
Liu, Yaping
Zhang, Yongmin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Knowledge distillation has been widely adopted in computer vision task processing, since it can effectively enhance the performance of lightweight student networks by leveraging the knowledge transferred from cumbersome teacher networks. Most existing knowledge distillation methods utilize Kullback-Leibler divergence to mimic the logit output probabilities between the teacher network and the student network. Nonetheless, these methods may neglect the negative parts of the teacher's ''dark knowledge'' because the divergence calculations may ignore the effect of the minute probabilities from the teacher's logit output. This deficiency may lead to suboptimal performance in logit mimicry during the distillation process and result in an imbalance of information acquired by the student network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this imbalance and propose a novel method, named Balance Divergence Distillation. By introducing a compensatory operation using reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence, our method can improve the modeling of the extremely small values in the negative from the teacher and preserve the learning capacity for the positive. Furthermore, we test the impact of different temperature coefficients adjustments, which may conducted to further balance for knowledge transferring. We evaluate the proposed method on several computer vision tasks, including image classification and semantic segmentation. The evaluation results show that our method achieves an accuracy improvement of 1%~3% for lightweight students on both CIFAR-100 and ImageNet dataset, and a 4.55% improvement in mIoU for PSP-ResNet18 on the Cityscapes dataset. The experiments show that our method is a simple yet highly effective solution that can be smoothly applied to different knowledge distillation methods.
title Balance Divergence for Knowledge Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07804