Simplifying Knowledge Transfer in Pretrained Models

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Main Authors: Jain, Siddharth, Karthik, Shyamgopal, Gandhi, Vineet
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jain, Siddharth
Karthik, Shyamgopal
Gandhi, Vineet
author_facet Jain, Siddharth
Karthik, Shyamgopal
Gandhi, Vineet
contents Pretrained models are ubiquitous in the current deep learning landscape, offering strong results on a broad range of tasks. Recent works have shown that models differing in various design choices exhibit categorically diverse generalization behavior, resulting in one model grasping distinct data-specific insights unavailable to the other. In this paper, we propose to leverage large publicly available model repositories as an auxiliary source of model improvements. We introduce a data partitioning strategy where pretrained models autonomously adopt either the role of a student, seeking knowledge, or that of a teacher, imparting knowledge. Experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In image classification, we improved the performance of ViT-B by approximately 1.4% through bidirectional knowledge transfer with ViT-T. For semantic segmentation, our method boosted all evaluation metrics by enabling knowledge transfer both within and across backbone architectures. In video saliency prediction, our approach achieved a new state-of-the-art. We further extend our approach to knowledge transfer between multiple models, leading to considerable performance improvements for all model participants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22208
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simplifying Knowledge Transfer in Pretrained Models
Jain, Siddharth
Karthik, Shyamgopal
Gandhi, Vineet
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pretrained models are ubiquitous in the current deep learning landscape, offering strong results on a broad range of tasks. Recent works have shown that models differing in various design choices exhibit categorically diverse generalization behavior, resulting in one model grasping distinct data-specific insights unavailable to the other. In this paper, we propose to leverage large publicly available model repositories as an auxiliary source of model improvements. We introduce a data partitioning strategy where pretrained models autonomously adopt either the role of a student, seeking knowledge, or that of a teacher, imparting knowledge. Experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In image classification, we improved the performance of ViT-B by approximately 1.4% through bidirectional knowledge transfer with ViT-T. For semantic segmentation, our method boosted all evaluation metrics by enabling knowledge transfer both within and across backbone architectures. In video saliency prediction, our approach achieved a new state-of-the-art. We further extend our approach to knowledge transfer between multiple models, leading to considerable performance improvements for all model participants.
title Simplifying Knowledge Transfer in Pretrained Models
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22208