Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Weighting for Image Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Li, Zhengda
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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_version_ 1866909773794902016
author Li, Zhengda
author_facet Li, Zhengda
contents Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely used technique to transfer knowledge from a large teacher network to a smaller student model. Traditional KD uses a fixed balancing factor alpha as a hyperparameter to combine the hard-label cross-entropy loss with the soft-label distillation loss. However, a static alpha is suboptimal because the optimal trade-off between hard and soft supervision can vary during training. In this work, we propose an Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (AKD) framework. First we try to make alpha as learnable parameter that can be automatically learned and optimized during training. Then we introduce a formula to reflect the gap between the student and the teacher to compute alpha dynamically, guided by student-teacher discrepancies, and further introduce a Context-Aware Module (CAM) using MLP + Attention to adaptively reweight class-wise teacher outputs. Experiments on CIFAR-10 with ResNet-50 as teacher and ResNet-18 as student demonstrate that our approach achieves superior accuracy compared to fixed-weight KD baselines, and yields more stable convergence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_05319
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Weighting for Image Classification
Li, Zhengda
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely used technique to transfer knowledge from a large teacher network to a smaller student model. Traditional KD uses a fixed balancing factor alpha as a hyperparameter to combine the hard-label cross-entropy loss with the soft-label distillation loss. However, a static alpha is suboptimal because the optimal trade-off between hard and soft supervision can vary during training. In this work, we propose an Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (AKD) framework. First we try to make alpha as learnable parameter that can be automatically learned and optimized during training. Then we introduce a formula to reflect the gap between the student and the teacher to compute alpha dynamically, guided by student-teacher discrepancies, and further introduce a Context-Aware Module (CAM) using MLP + Attention to adaptively reweight class-wise teacher outputs. Experiments on CIFAR-10 with ResNet-50 as teacher and ResNet-18 as student demonstrate that our approach achieves superior accuracy compared to fixed-weight KD baselines, and yields more stable convergence.
title Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Weighting for Image Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05319