Despite the fact that deep neural networks are powerful models and achieve appealing results on many tasks, they are too large to be deployed on edge devices like smartphones or embedded sensor nodes. There have been efforts to compress these networks, and a popular method is knowledge distillation, where a large (teacher) pre-trained network is used to train a smaller (student) network. However, in this paper, we show that the student network performance degrades when the gap between student and teacher is large. Given a fixed student network, one cannot employ an arbitrarily large teacher, or in other words, a teacher can effectively transfer its knowledge to students up to a certain size, not smaller. To alleviate this shortcoming, we introduce multi-step knowledge distillation, which employs an intermediate-sized network (teacher assistant) to bridge the gap between the student and the teacher. Moreover, we study the effect of teacher assistant size and extend the framework to multi-step distillation. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on CIFAR-10,100 and ImageNet datasets and on CNN and ResNet architectures substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Figure 1. An illustration of standard knowledge distillation. Despite widespread use, an understanding of when the student can learn from the teacher is missing.

机器学习中的知识蒸馏是将知识从名为教师的大型模型转移到一个名为“学生”的较小模型的过程。知识蒸馏是将大型网络（教师）压缩到较小网络（学生）的技术之一，该网络可以部署在手机等小型设备中。当教师和学生之间的网络规模差距增加时，学生网络的表现就会下降。为了解决这个问题，在教师模型和名为助教模型的学生模型之间采用了中间模型，这反过来弥补了教师与学生之间的差距。在这项研究中，我们已经表明，使用多个助教模型，可以进一步改进学生模型（较小的模型）。我们使用加权集合学习将这些多个助教模型组合在一起，我们使用了差异评估优化算法来生成权重值。

Often we wish to transfer representational knowledge from one neural network to another. Examples include distilling a large network into a smaller one, transferring knowledge from one sensory modality to a second, or ensembling a collection of models into a single estimator. Knowledge distillation, the standard approach to these problems, minimizes the KL divergence between the probabilistic outputs of a teacher and student network. We demonstrate that this objective ignores important structural knowledge of the teacher network. This motivates an alternative objective by which we train a student to capture significantly more information in the teacher's representation of the data. We formulate this objective as contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate that our resulting new objective outperforms knowledge distillation and other cutting-edge distillers on a variety of knowledge transfer tasks, including single model compression, ensemble distillation, and cross-modal transfer. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art in many transfer tasks, and sometimes even outperforms the teacher network when combined with knowledge distillation.

知识蒸馏是将“知识”从大型模型（教师）转移到更紧凑的（学生）的过程，通常在模型压缩的背景下使用。当两个模型都具有相同的体系结构时，此过程称为自distillation。几项轶事表明，一个自灭的学生可以在持有的数据上胜过老师的表现。在这项工作中，我们系统地研究了许多设置。我们首先表明，即使有一个高度准确的老师，自我介绍也使学生在所有情况下都可以超越老师。其次，我们重新审视了（自我）蒸馏的现有理论解释，并确定矛盾的例子，揭示了这些解释的可能缺点。最后，我们通过损失景观几何形状的镜头为自我鉴定的动态提供了另一种解释。我们进行了广泛的实验，以表明自我验证会导致最小化的最小值，从而导致更好的概括。

尽管深层神经网络在各种任务中取得了巨大的成功，但它们不断增加的规模也为部署带来了重要的开销。为了压缩这些模型，提出了知识蒸馏将知识从笨拙（教师）网络转移到轻量级（学生）网络中。但是，老师的指导并不总是改善学生的概括，尤其是当学生和老师之间的差距很大时。以前的作品认为，这是由于老师的高确定性，导致更难适应的标签。为了软化这些标签，我们提出了一种修剪方法，称为预测不确定性扩大（PRUE），以简化教师。具体而言，我们的方法旨在减少教师对数据的确定性，从而为学生产生软预测。我们从经验上研究了提出的方法通过在CIFAR-10/100，Tiny-Imagenet和Imagenet上实验的实验的有效性。结果表明，接受稀疏教师培训的学生网络取得更好的表现。此外，我们的方法允许研究人员从更深的网络中提取知识，以进一步改善学生。我们的代码公开：\ url {https://github.com/wangshaopu/prue}。

Transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network pretrained on the same or a similar task to a student neural network can significantly improve the performance of the student neural network. Existing knowledge transfer approaches match the activations or the corresponding handcrafted features of the teacher and the student networks. We propose an information-theoretic framework for knowledge transfer which formulates knowledge transfer as maximizing the mutual information between the teacher and the student networks. We compare our method with existing knowledge transfer methods on both knowledge distillation and transfer learning tasks and show that our method consistently outperforms existing methods. We further demonstrate the strength of our method on knowledge transfer across heterogeneous network architectures by transferring knowledge from a convolutional neural network (CNN) to a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) on CIFAR-10. The resulting MLP significantly outperforms the-state-of-the-art methods and it achieves similar performance to the CNN with a single convolutional layer. * Contributed during an internship at Amazon.

知识蒸馏是通过知识转移模型压缩的有效稳定的方法。传统知识蒸馏（KD）是将来自大型和训练有素的教师网络的知识转移到小型学生网络，这是一种单向过程。最近，已经提出了深度相互学习（DML）来帮助学生网络协同和同时学习。然而，据我们所知，KD和DML从未在统一的框架中共同探索，以解决知识蒸馏问题。在本文中，我们调查教师模型在KD中支持更值得信赖的监督信号，而学生则在DML中捕获教师的类似行为。基于这些观察，我们首先建议将KD与DML联合在统一的框架中。此外，我们提出了一个半球知识蒸馏（SOKD）方法，有效提高了学生和教师的表现。在这种方法中，我们在DML中介绍了同伴教学培训时尚，以缓解学生的模仿困难，并利用KD训练有素的教师提供的监督信号。此外，我们还显示我们的框架可以轻松扩展到基于功能的蒸馏方法。在CiFAR-100和Imagenet数据集上的广泛实验证明了所提出的方法实现了最先进的性能。

知识蒸馏将知识从繁琐的老师转移到小学生。最近的结果表明，对学生友好的老师更适合提炼，因为它提供了更可转移的知识。在这项工作中，我们提出了新颖的框架“修剪，然后蒸馏”，该框架首先修剪模型，以使其更具转让，然后将其提炼为学生。我们提供了几个探索性示例，这些探索性示例与原始未经修复的网络相比，教师教的更好。从理论上讲，我们进一步表明，修剪的老师在蒸馏中扮演正规剂的角色，从而减少了概括误差。基于此结果，我们提出了一种新型的神经网络压缩方案，该方案根据修剪教师形成学生网络，然后采用“修剪，然后蒸馏”策略。该代码可在https://github.com/ososos8888/prune-then-distill上找到

Knowledge distillation (KD) has gained a lot of attention in the field of model compression for edge devices thanks to its effectiveness in compressing large powerful networks into smaller lower-capacity models. Online distillation, in which both the teacher and the student are learning collaboratively, has also gained much interest due to its ability to improve on the performance of the networks involved. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence ensures the proper knowledge transfer between the teacher and student. However, most online KD techniques present some bottlenecks under the network capacity gap. By cooperatively and simultaneously training, the models the KL distance becomes incapable of properly minimizing the teacher's and student's distributions. Alongside accuracy, critical edge device applications are in need of well-calibrated compact networks. Confidence calibration provides a sensible way of getting trustworthy predictions. We propose BD-KD: Balancing of Divergences for online Knowledge Distillation. We show that adaptively balancing between the reverse and forward divergences shifts the focus of the training strategy to the compact student network without limiting the teacher network's learning process. We demonstrate that, by performing this balancing design at the level of the student distillation loss, we improve upon both performance accuracy and calibration of the compact student network. We conducted extensive experiments using a variety of network architectures and show improvements on multiple datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive comparisons and ablations with current state-of-the-art online and offline KD techniques.

在这项工作中，我们提出了相互信息最大化知识蒸馏（MIMKD）。我们的方法使用对比目标来同时估计，并最大化教师和学生网络之间的本地和全球特征表示的相互信息的下限。我们通过广泛的实验证明，这可以通过将知识从更加性能但计算昂贵的模型转移来改善低容量模型的性能。这可用于产生更好的模型，可以在具有低计算资源的设备上运行。我们的方法灵活，我们可以将具有任意网络架构的教师蒸馏到任意学生网络。我们的经验结果表明，MIMKD优于各种学生教师对的竞争方法，具有不同的架构，以及学生网络的容量极低。我们能够通过从Reset-50蒸馏出来的知识，从基线精度为Shufflenetv2获得74.55％的精度。在Imagenet上，我们使用Reset-34教师网络将Reset-18网络从68.88％提高到70.32％的准确度（1.44％+）。

知识蒸馏是一种培训小型学生网络的流行技术，以模仿更大的教师模型，例如网络的集合。我们表明，虽然知识蒸馏可以改善学生泛化，但它通常不得如此普遍地工作：虽然在教师和学生的预测分布之间，甚至在学生容量的情况下，通常仍然存在令人惊讶的差异完美地匹配老师。我们认为优化的困难是为什么学生无法与老师匹配的关键原因。我们还展示了用于蒸馏的数据集的细节如何在学生与老师匹配的紧密关系中发挥作用 - 以及教师矛盾的教师并不总是导致更好的学生泛化。

知识蒸馏（KD）是压缩边缘设备深层分类模型的有效工具。但是，KD的表现受教师和学生网络之间较大容量差距的影响。最近的方法已诉诸KD的多个教师助手（TA）设置，该设置依次降低了教师模型的大小，以相对弥合这些模型之间的尺寸差距。本文提出了一种称为“知识蒸馏”课程专家选择的新技术，以有效地增强在容量差距问题下对紧凑型学生的学习。该技术建立在以下假设的基础上：学生网络应逐渐使用分层的教学课程来逐步指导，因为它可以从较低（较高的）容量教师网络中更好地学习（硬）数据样本。具体而言，我们的方法是一种基于TA的逐渐的KD技术，它每个输入图像选择单个教师，该课程是基于通过对图像进行分类的难度驱动的课程的。在这项工作中，我们凭经验验证了我们的假设，并对CIFAR-10，CIFAR-100，CINIC-10和Imagenet数据集进行了严格的实验，并在类似VGG的模型，Resnets和WideresNets架构上显示出提高的准确性。

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been extensively used for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks to improve a small model's (a student) generalization by transferring the knowledge from a larger model (a teacher). Although KD methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in numerous settings, they suffer from several problems limiting their performance. It is shown in the literature that the capacity gap between the teacher and the student networks can make KD ineffective. Additionally, existing KD techniques do not mitigate the noise in the teacher's output: modeling the noisy behaviour of the teacher can distract the student from learning more useful features. We propose a new KD method that addresses these problems and facilitates the training compared to previous techniques. Inspired by continuation optimization, we design a training procedure that optimizes the highly non-convex KD objective by starting with the smoothed version of this objective and making it more complex as the training proceeds. Our method (Continuation-KD) achieves state-of-the-art performance across various compact architectures on NLU (GLUE benchmark) and computer vision tasks (CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100).

在线知识蒸馏（OKD）通过相互利用教师和学生之间的差异来改善所涉及的模型。它们之间的差距上有几个关键的瓶颈 - 例如，为什么以及何时以及何时损害表现，尤其是对学生的表现？如何量化教师和学生之间的差距？ - 接受了有限的正式研究。在本文中，我们提出了可切换的在线知识蒸馏（Switokd），以回答这些问题。 Switokd的核心思想不是专注于测试阶段的准确性差距，而是通过两种模式之间的切换策略来适应训练阶段的差距，即蒸馏差距 - 专家模式（暂停老师，同时暂停教师保持学生学习）和学习模式（重新启动老师）。为了拥有适当的蒸馏差距，我们进一步设计了一个自适应开关阈值，该阈值提供了有关何时切换到学习模式或专家模式的正式标准，从而改善了学生的表现。同时，老师从我们的自适应切换阈值中受益，并基本上与其他在线艺术保持同步。我们进一步将Switokd扩展到具有两个基础拓扑的多个网络。最后，广泛的实验和分析验证了Switokd在最新面前的分类的优点。我们的代码可在https://github.com/hfutqian/switokd上找到。

While depth tends to improve network performances, it also makes gradient-based training more difficult since deeper networks tend to be more non-linear. The recently proposed knowledge distillation approach is aimed at obtaining small and fast-to-execute models, and it has shown that a student network could imitate the soft output of a larger teacher network or ensemble of networks. In this paper, we extend this idea to allow the training of a student that is deeper and thinner than the teacher, using not only the outputs but also the intermediate representations learned by the teacher as hints to improve the training process and final performance of the student. Because the student intermediate hidden layer will generally be smaller than the teacher's intermediate hidden layer, additional parameters are introduced to map the student hidden layer to the prediction of the teacher hidden layer. This allows one to train deeper students that can generalize better or run faster, a trade-off that is controlled by the chosen student capacity. For example, on CIFAR-10, a deep student network with almost 10.4 times less parameters outperforms a larger, state-of-the-art teacher network.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) consists of transferring "knowledge" from one machine learning model (the teacher) to another (the student). Commonly, the teacher is a high-capacity model with formidable performance, while the student is more compact. By transferring knowledge, one hopes to benefit from the student's compactness, without sacrificing too much performance. We study KD from a new perspective: rather than compressing models, we train students parameterized identically to their teachers. Surprisingly, these Born-Again Networks (BANs), outperform their teachers significantly, both on computer vision and language modeling tasks. Our experiments with BANs based on DenseNets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the CIFAR-10 (3.5%) and CIFAR-100 (15.5%) datasets, by validation error. Additional experiments explore two distillation objectives: (i) Confidence-Weighted by Teacher Max (CWTM) and (ii) Dark Knowledge with Permuted Predictions (DKPP). Both methods elucidate the essential components of KD, demonstrating the effect of the teacher outputs on both predicted and nonpredicted classes.

Knowledge distillation is a widely applicable techniquefor training a student neural network under the guidance of a trained teacher network. For example, in neural network compression, a high-capacity teacher is distilled to train a compact student; in privileged learning, a teacher trained with privileged data is distilled to train a student without access to that data. The distillation loss determines how a teacher's knowledge is captured and transferred to the student. In this paper, we propose a new form of knowledge distillation loss that is inspired by the observation that semantically similar inputs tend to elicit similar activation patterns in a trained network. Similarity-preserving knowledge distillation guides the training of a student network such that input pairs that produce similar (dissimilar) activations in the teacher network produce similar (dissimilar) activations in the student network. In contrast to previous distillation methods, the student is not required to mimic the representation space of the teacher, but rather to preserve the pairwise similarities in its own representation space. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the potential of our approach.

One of the most efficient methods for model compression is hint distillation, where the student model is injected with information (hints) from several different layers of the teacher model. Although the selection of hint points can drastically alter the compression performance, conventional distillation approaches overlook this fact and use the same hint points as in the early studies. Therefore, we propose a clustering based hint selection methodology, where the layers of teacher model are clustered with respect to several metrics and the cluster centers are used as the hint points. Our method is applicable for any student network, once it is applied on a chosen teacher network. The proposed approach is validated in CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets, using various teacher-student pairs and numerous hint distillation methods. Our results show that hint points selected by our algorithm results in superior compression performance compared to state-of-the-art knowledge distillation algorithms on the same student models and datasets.

尽管知识蒸馏有经验成功，但仍然缺乏理论基础，可以自然地导致计算廉价的实现。为了解决这一问题，我们使用最近提出的熵函数来促进信息理论与知识蒸馏之间的替代联系。在这样做时，我们介绍了两个不同的互补损失，旨在最大限度地提高学生和教师陈述之间的相关性和互信。我们的方法对知识蒸馏和跨模型转移任务的最先进的竞争性能实现了最先进的，同时产生明显较低的培训开销，而不是密切相关和类似的方法。我们进一步展示了我们对二元蒸馏任务的方法的有效性，由此，我们将光线光到新的最先进的二进制量化。代码，评估协议和培训的型号将公开可用。