{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distilling-and-transferring-knowledge-via","title":"Distilling and Transferring Knowledge via cGAN-generated Samples for Image Classification and Regression","arxiv_id":"2104.03164","date":"2021-04-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xin Ding","Yongwei Wang","Zuheng Xu","Z. Jane Wang","William J. Welch"],"abstract":"Knowledge distillation (KD) has been actively studied for image classification tasks in deep learning, aiming to improve the performance of a student based on the knowledge from a teacher. However, applying KD in image regression with a scalar response variable has been rarely studied, and there exists no KD method applicable to both classification and regression tasks yet. Moreover, existing KD methods often require a practitioner to carefully select or adjust the teacher and student architectures, making these methods less flexible in practice. To address the above problems in a unified way, we propose a comprehensive KD framework based on cGANs, termed cGAN-KD. Fundamentally different from existing KD methods, cGAN-KD distills and transfers knowledge from a teacher model to a student model via cGAN-generated samples. This novel mechanism makes cGAN-KD suitable for both classification and regression tasks, compatible with other KD methods, and insensitive to the teacher and student architectures. An error bound for a student model trained in the cGAN-KD framework is derived in this work, providing a theory for why cGAN-KD is effective as well as guiding the practical implementation of cGAN-KD. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-100 show that we can combine state of the art KD methods with the cGAN-KD framework to yield a new state of the art. Moreover, experiments on Steering Angle and UTKFace demonstrate the effectiveness of cGAN-KD in image regression tasks, where existing KD methods are inapplicable.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03164v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.03164v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distilling-and-transferring-knowledge-via","repo_url":"https://github.com/UBCDingXin/cGAN-based_KD","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"distilling-and-transferring-knowledge-via","repo_url":"https://github.com/UBCDingXin/cGAN-KD","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}