{"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/the-effect-of-optimal-self-distillation-in","title":"The Effect of Optimal Self-Distillation in Noisy Gaussian Mixture Model","arxiv_id":"2501.16226","date":"2025-01-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kaito Takanami","Takashi Takahashi","Ayaka Sakata"],"abstract":"Self-distillation (SD), a technique where a model improves itself using its own predictions, has attracted attention as a simple yet powerful approach in machine learning. Despite its widespread use, the mechanisms underlying its effectiveness remain unclear. In this study, we investigate the efficacy of hyperparameter-tuned multi-stage SD with a linear classifier for binary classification on noisy Gaussian mixture data. For the analysis, we employ the replica method from statistical physics. Our findings reveal that the primary driver of SD's performance improvement is denoising through hard pseudo-labels, with the most notable gains observed in moderately sized datasets. We also identify two practical heuristics to enhance SD: early stopping that limits the number of stages, which is broadly effective, and bias parameter fixing, which helps under label imbalance. To empirically validate our theoretical findings derived from our toy model, we conduct additional experiments on CIFAR-10 classification using pretrained ResNet backbone. These results provide both theoretical and practical insights, advancing our understanding and application of SD in noisy settings.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16226v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16226v3.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":"the-effect-of-optimal-self-distillation-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/taka255/self-distillation-analysis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"binary-classification","task_name":"Binary Classification"},{"task_slug":"denoising","task_name":"Denoising"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"early-stopping","method_name":"Early Stopping"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.16226","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2501.16226"}},"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. 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