arXiv Machine Learning

Discovering and Preserving Category Correlation Knowledge via Adaptive Reciprocal Knowledge Distillation

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 Computer Vision
Sep 18

Enhanced Knowledge Distillation for Detection Transformer via Teacher Prediction Refinement

The paper introduces Teacher Prediction Refinement Distillation (TPRD), a plug‑in module for Detection Transformers that refines teacher predictions before distillation. TPRD corrects degraded positive predictions and suppresses overconfident negatives, while preserving informative dark knowledge through Maximum Dark Knowledge Preservation. Experiments on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC show that these refinements improve the quality of supervision and the resulting student model’s performance.

By Yitong Xing, Yuhao Cheng, Yanping Li, Yichao Yan
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

IDeaL: Data-Free Multi-Teacher Distillation via Improved Dead Leaves

The paper introduces IDeaL, a data‑free multi‑teacher distillation technique that generates teacher‑specific, improved samples using decorrelation losses at patch and image levels. By tailoring noise to each teacher, IDeaL produces strong student models that capture complementary teacher information and achieve results close to those distilled from real images. Experiments demonstrate that with only 1,000 images, students trained on IDeaL samples match or exceed the performance of students distilled from a 1,000‑image subset of ImageNet.

By Feyza Yavuz, Mert B\"ulent Sar{\i}y{\i}ld{\i}z, Diane Larlus
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto