arXiv Machine Learning

Collaborative Knowledge Distillation via a Learning-by-Education Node Community

arXiv:2410. 00074v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A novel Learning-by-Education Node Community framework (LENC) for Collaborative Knowledge Distillation (CKD) is presented, which facilitates continual collective learning through effective knowledge exchanges among diverse deployed Deep Neural Network (DNN) peer nodes.

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
2d ago

Dyna-DINO: Efficient ViT Distillation Via Adaptive Representation Anchoring

Dyna‑DINO introduces a curriculum for Vision Transformer (ViT) knowledge distillation that uses the teacher’s intermediate feature maps as progressively harder targets, enabling a student to build foundational representations before tackling higher‑level abstractions. The approach accelerates convergence and improves performance across multiple tasks: on ImageNet‑100 the distilled ViT‑S reaches 90.1% accuracy (+12.24% over baseline), while on ImageNet‑1K it yields +3.9% and +6.09% gains on Oxford and Paris retrieval, +1.93% on semantic segmentation, and notable classification improvements. Additionally, the curriculum reduces training FLOPs by 25.1% and training time by 21% on ImageNet‑100 through early‑stopping of teacher inference.

By Jiaqi Zhang, Ashton Lee, Anthony Wong, John Zou, Sami BuGhanem, Randall Balestriero
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Decoupled and Distilled: Task-Adaptive LoRA-Teachers with Ensemble Knowledge Transfer for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

The paper introduces TALON, a Task‑Adaptive LoRA‑Teacher framework for Few‑Shot Class‑Incremental Learning. TALON assigns a dedicated LoRA‑Teacher to each incremental task, then distills the frozen teachers into a single LoRA‑Student via Ensemble Knowledge Transfer, using a semantic‑guided weighting scheme to reduce forgetting and overfitting. Experiments on four FSCIL benchmarks show that TALON matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art accuracy while using up to 33× fewer deployment parameters and cutting inference time by 41.7%.

By Hongwei Zhao (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Rui Liu (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Yansong Liu (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Zhiyuan Zou (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Yong Chen (School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts,Telecommunications)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

KeepLoRA++: Continual Learning with Layer-Scaled Residual Gradient Adaptation

arXiv:2606. 16256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge.

By Mao-Lin Luo, Yi-Lin Zhang, Zi-Hao Zhou, Yankun Hong, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Tong Wei, Min-Ling Zhang