The paper investigates how knowledge distillation from Vision Transformers to smaller CNNs can cause dimensional collapse in the student’s representation space. Using SVD and Shannon entropy, the authors show that cosine‑based distillation leads to a drastic reduction in effective rank, while adding an InfoNCE objective can double the rank but harms downstream accuracy due to signal dilution. They further demonstrate that a label‑aware contrastive objective (Supervised Contrastive distillation) can maintain or improve accuracy without unnecessary rank expansion, indicating that effective rank alone is not a reliable indicator of representation quality.
arXiv:2608. 01263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) samples trajectories from the current student policy and minimizes token-level divergence between student and teacher next-token distributions at prefixes along those trajectories.
The paper introduces Contrastive Vision On‑policy Distillation (CV‑OPD), a method that enhances on‑policy distillation for vision‑language models by adding a contrastive divergence loss and a discrepancy‑aware gating mechanism. CV‑OPD contrasts teacher distributions from positive and negative visual crops, forcing the student to rely on genuine visual evidence rather than shortcuts. Experiments on fine‑grained visual benchmarks show that CV‑OPD reduces shortcut learning and improves visual reasoning across existing VLMs.
arXiv:2609.23561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying efficient neural networks is essential in resource-constrained environments, yet compact models often sacrifice interpretability - a critical...
arXiv:2607.01630v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dynamic expansion methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) protect task-specific knowledge by growing dedicated tokens or subnetworks, yet our...
Vision Transformers underperform convolutional networks when training data is scarce, and distilling convolutional inductive biases from a CNN teacher is an effective remedy that leaves the deployed model unchanged. General-purpose feature distillation, however, transfers little in this setting.
Dynamic expansion methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) protect task-specific knowledge by growing dedicated tokens or subnetworks, yet our analyses suggest that classification supervision alone does not sufficiently preserve task-agnostic shared backbone representations over long incremental sequences. We identify two intertwined challenges: cross-task confusion from sequential training on predominantly current-task data, which biases decision boundaries toward recent tasks; and under-optimized shared representations in the backbone that cap long-term discriminability as tasks accumulate.
arXiv:2608. 14144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual on-policy distillation relies heavily on an informative teacher-student asymmetry, through either a larger, stronger teacher or privileged supervision, such as reference answers or ground-truth regions of interest.
arXiv:2610.33520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running deep models for medical image analysis at the point of care is challenging with standard architectures: convolutional neural networks (CNNs) ar...
arXiv:2607. 12438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep networks trained with label noise often learn clean structure before memorizing corrupted labels.
arXiv:2605.10641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are successful in addressing a multitude of vision-language understanding tasks, such as Visual Question...
arXiv:2606. 00105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on vision-language tasks, but they may also memorize and expose sensitive or restricted knowledge, raising concerns about privacy and broader safety risks.
CA-OPD is a confidence‑aware on‑policy distillation framework that improves structured visual prediction by using teacher confidence to selectively correct unreliable student transitions and gradually transfer rollout control to the student. The method aligns supervision with intervention decisions, providing direct cross‑entropy loss for corrected tokens and full predictive distribution for retained tokens. In a multi‑teacher setting for GUI grounding and OCR, CA‑OPD significantly outperforms the Qwen3.5‑0.8B baseline, achieving large gains on benchmarks such as ScreenSpot‑Pro and OCRBench‑v2 English.