Contrastive Representation Distillation via Multi-Scale Feature Decoupling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Cuipeng, Wang, Haipeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Cuipeng
Wang, Haipeng
author_facet Wang, Cuipeng
Wang, Haipeng
contents Knowledge distillation enhances the performance of compact student networks by transferring knowledge from more powerful teacher networks without introducing additional parameters. In the feature space, local regions within an individual global feature encode distinct yet interdependent semantic information. Previous feature-based distillation methods mainly emphasize global feature alignment while neglecting the decoupling of local regions within an individual global feature, which often results in semantic confusion and suboptimal performance. Moreover, conventional contrastive representation distillation suffers from low efficiency due to its reliance on a large memory buffer to store feature samples. To address these limitations, this work proposes MSDCRD, a model-agnostic distillation framework that systematically decouples global features into multi-scale local features and leverages the resulting semantically rich feature samples with tailored sample-wise and feature-wise contrastive losses. This design enables efficient distillation using only a single batch, eliminating the dependence on external memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSDCRD achieves superior performance not only in homogeneous teacher-student settings but also in heterogeneous architectures where feature discrepancies are more pronounced, highlighting its strong generalization capability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05835
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contrastive Representation Distillation via Multi-Scale Feature Decoupling
Wang, Cuipeng
Wang, Haipeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge distillation enhances the performance of compact student networks by transferring knowledge from more powerful teacher networks without introducing additional parameters. In the feature space, local regions within an individual global feature encode distinct yet interdependent semantic information. Previous feature-based distillation methods mainly emphasize global feature alignment while neglecting the decoupling of local regions within an individual global feature, which often results in semantic confusion and suboptimal performance. Moreover, conventional contrastive representation distillation suffers from low efficiency due to its reliance on a large memory buffer to store feature samples. To address these limitations, this work proposes MSDCRD, a model-agnostic distillation framework that systematically decouples global features into multi-scale local features and leverages the resulting semantically rich feature samples with tailored sample-wise and feature-wise contrastive losses. This design enables efficient distillation using only a single batch, eliminating the dependence on external memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSDCRD achieves superior performance not only in homogeneous teacher-student settings but also in heterogeneous architectures where feature discrepancies are more pronounced, highlighting its strong generalization capability.
title Contrastive Representation Distillation via Multi-Scale Feature Decoupling
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05835