{"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/function-consistent-feature-distillation","title":"Function-Consistent Feature Distillation","arxiv_id":"2304.11832","date":"2023-04-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dongyang Liu","Meina Kan","Shiguang Shan","Xilin Chen"],"abstract":"Feature distillation makes the student mimic the intermediate features of the teacher. Nearly all existing feature-distillation methods use L2 distance or its slight variants as the distance metric between teacher and student features. However, while L2 distance is isotropic w.r.t. all dimensions, the neural network's operation on different dimensions is usually anisotropic, i.e., perturbations with the same 2-norm but in different dimensions of intermediate features lead to changes in the final output with largely different magnitude. Considering this, we argue that the similarity between teacher and student features should not be measured merely based on their appearance (i.e., L2 distance), but should, more importantly, be measured by their difference in function, namely how later layers of the network will read, decode, and process them. Therefore, we propose Function-Consistent Feature Distillation (FCFD), which explicitly optimizes the functional similarity between teacher and student features. The core idea of FCFD is to make teacher and student features not only numerically similar, but more importantly produce similar outputs when fed to the later part of the same network. With FCFD, the student mimics the teacher more faithfully and learns more from the teacher. Extensive experiments on image classification and object detection demonstrate the superiority of FCFD to existing methods. Furthermore, we can combine FCFD with many existing methods to obtain even higher accuracy. Our codes are available at https://github.com/LiuDongyang6/FCFD.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11832v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11832v1.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":"function-consistent-feature-distillation","repo_url":"https://github.com/liudongyang6/fcfd","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-1","task_name":"object-detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2304.11832","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2304.11832"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/LiuDongyang6/FCFD","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/liudongyang6/fcfd","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"077397b161146b98","entry":"build_bridges","repo":"liudongyang6/fcfd","repo_kind":"official","path":"detection/model/FCFD.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liudongyang6/fcfd/blob/HEAD/detection/model/FCFD.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"077397b161146b98"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}