Papers › Knowledge Distillation with the Reused Teacher Classifier

Knowledge Distillation with the Reused Teacher Classifier

26 Mar 2022CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2203.14001archive 2025-07-28

Defang Chen, Jian-Ping Mei, Hailin Zhang, Can Wang, Yan Feng, Chun Chen

Knowledge distillation aims to compress a powerful yet cumbersome teacher model into a lightweight student model without much sacrifice of performance. For this purpose, various approaches have been proposed over the past few years, generally with elaborately designed knowledge representations, which in turn increase the difficulty of model development and interpretation. In contrast, we empirically show that a simple knowledge distillation technique is enough to significantly narrow down the teacher-student performance gap. We directly reuse the discriminative classifier from the pre-trained teacher model for student inference and train a student encoder through feature alignment with a single ℓ₂ loss. In this way, the student model is able to achieve exactly the same performance as the teacher model provided that their extracted features are perfectly aligned. An additional projector is developed to help the student encoder match with the teacher classifier, which renders our technique applicable to various teacher and student architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our technique achieves state-of-the-art results at the modest cost of compression ratio due to the added projector.

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Tasks

Knowledge Distillation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Knowledge Distillation CIFAR-100 resnet8x4 (T: resnet32x4 S: resnet8x4 [modified]) Top-1 Accuracy (%) 78.08 #5 of 27 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Knowledge Distillation

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