{"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/students-are-the-best-teacher-exit-ensemble","title":"Students are the Best Teacher: Exit-Ensemble Distillation with Multi-Exits","arxiv_id":"2104.00299","date":"2021-04-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hojung Lee","Jong-Seok Lee"],"abstract":"This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation-based learning method to improve the classification performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) without a pre-trained teacher network, called exit-ensemble distillation. Our method exploits the multi-exit architecture that adds auxiliary classifiers (called exits) in the middle of a conventional CNN, through which early inference results can be obtained. The idea of our method is to train the network using the ensemble of the exits as the distillation target, which greatly improves the classification performance of the overall network. Our method suggests a new paradigm of knowledge distillation; unlike the conventional notion of distillation where teachers only teach students, we show that students can also help other students and even the teacher to learn better. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvement of classification performance on various popular CNN architectures (VGG, ResNet, ResNeXt, WideResNet, etc.). Furthermore, the proposed method can expedite the convergence of learning with improved stability. Our code will be available on Github.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00299v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00299v2.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":"students-are-the-best-teacher-exit-ensemble","repo_url":"https://github.com/hjdw2/Exit-Ensemble-Distillation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification-1","task_name":"Classification"},{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"bottleneck-residual-block","method_name":"Bottleneck Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"grouped-convolution","method_name":"Grouped Convolution"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"resnext","method_name":"ResNeXt"},{"method_slug":"resnext-block","method_name":"ResNeXt Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"wide-residual-block","method_name":"Wide Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"wideresnet","method_name":"WideResNet"}],"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}