{"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/scaffolding-a-student-to-instill-knowledge","title":"Scaffolding a Student to Instill Knowledge","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2023-05-01","proceeding":"International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 5","authors":["Anil Kag","Durmus Alp Emre Acar","Aditya Gangrade","Venkatesh Saligrama"],"abstract":"We propose a novel knowledge distillation (KD) method to selectively instill teacher knowledge into a student model motivated by situations where the student's capacity is significantly smaller than that of the teachers. In vanilla KD, the teacher primarily sets a predictive target for the student to follow, and we posit that this target is overly optimistic due to the student's lack of capacity. We develop a novel scaffolding scheme where the teacher, in addition to setting a predictive target, also scaffolds the student's prediction by censoring hard-to-learn examples. Scaffolding utilizes the same information as the teacher's soft-max predictions as inputs, and in this sense, our proposal can be viewed as a natural variant of vanilla KD. We show on synthetic examples that censoring hard-examples leads to smoothening the student's loss landscape so that the student encounters fewer local minima. As a result, it has good generalization properties. Against vanilla KD, we achieve improved performance and are comparable to more intrusive techniques that leverage feature matching on benchmark datasets.","url_abs":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=N4K5ck-BTT","url_pdf":"https://openreview.net/pdf?id=N4K5ck-BTT","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":"scaffolding-a-student-to-instill-knowledge","repo_url":"https://github.com/anilkagak2/DiSK_Distilling_Scaffolded_Knowledge","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}