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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ettori, Davide, Darabi, Nastaran, Senthilkumar, Sureshkumar, Trivedi, Amit Ranjan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15724
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Table of Contents:
  • Large deep learning models such as BERT and ResNet achieve state-of-the-art performance but are costly to deploy at the edge due to their size and compute demands. We present RMT-KD, a compression method that leverages Random Matrix Theory (RMT) for knowledge distillation to iteratively reduce network size. Instead of pruning or heuristic rank selection, RMT-KD preserves only informative directions identified via the spectral properties of hidden representations. RMT-based causal reduction is applied layer by layer with self-distillation to maintain stability and accuracy. On GLUE and CIFAR-10, RMT-KD achieves up to 80% parameter reduction with only 2% accuracy loss, delivering 2.8x faster inference and nearly halved power consumption. These results establish RMT-KD as a mathematically grounded approach to network distillation.