arXiv Machine Learning

SPRKD: Effective Knowledge Distillation for Deep Neural Networks via Saddle Region Approximation

arXiv:2607. 23346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep neural networks are potent catalysts for scientific and industrial impact, yet excessive parameter counts impede deployment in low-compute settings such as hospital equipment and energy infrastructure.

arXiv Statistics ML
Aug 25

Interpretable AI with Local Distillation

Interpretable AI with Local Distillation proposes a method where a black‑box teacher model guides a regularized linear student model at each query point. The teacher defines locality by upweighting training observations with similar predicted outcomes and anchors the fit with its own prediction at the query point, treated as a pseudo‑observation. By adding Gaussian randomization and refitting, the approach identifies reliable features and stable subgroups, achieving near‑teacher accuracy while producing sparse, locally interpretable linear models.

By Erin Craig, Yiling Huang, Snigdha Panigrahi
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Too much of a good thing -- when knowledge distillation promotes overfitting, and how to avoid it

The paper investigates how knowledge distillation (KD) applied at intermediate layers of a neural network can affect overfitting and model performance. While traditional KD focuses on the final output, this study explores block‑wise KD across eleven datasets, finding that on standard datasets the last block suffices, but on fine‑grained, data‑scarce settings intermediate supervision significantly improves accuracy. The authors also analyze optimal supervision granularity using attention maps, Centered Kernel Alignment, and Grad‑CAM, and examine teacher‑student fine‑tuning strategies.

By Irene Trigueros-Lorca, Leonardo Concepci\'on, Christian Wagner, Isaac Triguero, Daniel Molina
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

arXiv:2503. 08038v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels.

By Jiequan Cui, Beier Zhu, Qingshan Xu, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaojuan Qi, Bei Yu, Hanwang Zhang, Richang Hong