Papers › Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher

Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher

21 May 2022arXiv:2205.10536archive 2025-07-28

Tao Huang, Shan You, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Chang Xu

Unlike existing knowledge distillation methods focus on the baseline settings, where the teacher models and training strategies are not that strong and competing as state-of-the-art approaches, this paper presents a method dubbed DIST to distill better from a stronger teacher. We empirically find that the discrepancy of predictions between the student and a stronger teacher may tend to be fairly severer. As a result, the exact match of predictions in KL divergence would disturb the training and make existing methods perform poorly. In this paper, we show that simply preserving the relations between the predictions of teacher and student would suffice, and propose a correlation-based loss to capture the intrinsic inter-class relations from the teacher explicitly. Besides, considering that different instances have different semantic similarities to each class, we also extend this relational match to the intra-class level. Our method is simple yet practical, and extensive experiments demonstrate that it adapts well to various architectures, model sizes and training strategies, and can achieve state-of-the-art performance consistently on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/hunto/DIST_KD .

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hunto/dist_kd officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
hunto/image_classification_sota mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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DIST hunto/dist_kd/segmentation/losses/dist_kd.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 18a915e624ecb904 · report
cosine_similarity hunto/dist_kd/segmentation/losses/dist_kd.py official repository ran · violated contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 38ede58bd9091f21 · report
inter_class_relation hunto/dist_kd/segmentation/losses/dist_kd.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b45038694ef6bb75 · report
intra_class_relation hunto/dist_kd/segmentation/losses/dist_kd.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 962968b3b922d520 · report
pearson_correlation hunto/dist_kd/segmentation/losses/dist_kd.py official repository ran · violated contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d00eea76cc523c64 · report
DISTLoss yoshitomo-matsubara/torchdistill/torchdistill/losses/mid_level.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 0c2f8410b866e04e · report
cosine_similarity hunto/image_classification_sota/lib/models/losses/dist_kd.py community (archive-listed) ran · violated contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · b5f44526e6cc6a9d · report
inter_class_relation hunto/image_classification_sota/lib/models/losses/dist_kd.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f26d395fbb7834a6 · report
intra_class_relation hunto/image_classification_sota/lib/models/losses/dist_kd.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 9837c466938259ff · report
pearson_correlation hunto/image_classification_sota/lib/models/losses/dist_kd.py community (archive-listed) ran · violated contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 8eb964c14770de5c · report
DIST hunto/image_classification_sota/lib/models/losses/dist_kd.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1def32553f080f5d · report

Tasks

Image ClassificationKnowledge DistillationObject DetectionSemantic Segmentationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Knowledge Distillation CIFAR-100 resnet8x4 (T: resnet32x4 S: resnet8x4) Top-1 Accuracy (%) 76.31 #10 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Knowledge Distillation ImageNet DIST (T: Swin-L S: Swin-T) CRD training setting ✘ #10 of 52 Archive leaderboard report
Knowledge Distillation ImageNet DIST (T: Swin-L S: Swin-T) Top-1 accuracy % 82.3 #10 of 52 Archive leaderboard report
Knowledge Distillation ImageNet DIST (T: Swin-L S: Swin-T) model size 29M #10 of 52 Archive leaderboard report
Knowledge Distillation ImageNet DIST (T: ResNet-34 S:ResNet-18) CRD training setting ✘ #34 of 52 Archive leaderboard report
Knowledge Distillation ImageNet DIST (T: ResNet-34 S:ResNet-18) Top-1 accuracy % 72.07 #34 of 52 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Knowledge Distillation

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