arXiv Machine Learning

What Do Students Learn? A Feature-Level Analysis of Dark Knowledge

arXiv:2606. 03052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a powerful tool for model compression, yet the precise mechanisms by which student models acquire feature representations remain underexplored.

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 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