The paper introduces Inverse Knowledge Distillation (IKD), an attack‑agnostic technique that enhances adversarial transferability by maximizing the discrepancy between benign and adversarial prediction distributions on a surrogate model. IKD employs a CE/KL‑equivalent soft‑label objective to push adversarial predictions away from a fixed benign anchor, leveraging Fisher‑sensitive surrogate directions. The authors provide theoretical analysis showing CE and KL induce identical gradients, derive a lower bound on Fisher‑subspace overlap, and demonstrate through extensive ImageNet experiments that IKD consistently improves black‑box attack performance across CNN, ViT, and defended models.
By Wenyuan Wu, Yuan Sun, Yingke Chen, Chao Su, Xi Peng, Dezhong Peng, Xu Wang
arXiv:2608.30699v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-tailed distributions are prevalent in real-world semi-supervised learning (SSL), where pseudo-labels tend to favor majority classes, leading to...
By Yue Cheng, Jiajun Zhang, Xiaohui Gao, Weiwei Xing, Zhanxing Zhu
The paper investigates how the sampled-token reverse-KL loss in on‑policy distillation distributes updates across tokens. By analyzing the gradient of the per‑token K2 estimator, the authors find that tokens with low student probability and large teacher‑student gaps receive disproportionately large gradient norms. They propose Surprise‑aware Reweighting (SuRe), a lightweight weighting rule that further amplifies this allocation, and demonstrate that SuRe improves math metrics on Qwen3 student models without harming out‑of‑domain performance.
By Bing Shao, Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma, Yujiong Shen, Senjie Jin, Xin Guo, Yuming Yang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
The paper introduces DUA-D2C, a Dynamic Uncertainty-Aware Divide2Conquer method that improves overfitting remediation in deep learning. It refines the traditional Divide2Conquer approach by dynamically weighting subset models based on a composite score of accuracy and normalized prediction entropy, allowing the central model to learn more from generalizable and confident edge models. The authors provide theoretical justification, show reduced model variance, and demonstrate significant generalization gains across image, audio, and text benchmarks, even when combined with standard regularizers like Dropout.
By Md. Saiful Bari Siddiqui, Md Mohaiminul Islam, Md. Golam Rabiul Alam
arXiv:2606. 16050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust deep learning under heavy-tailed and impulsive noise remains challenging because conventional losses such as mean squared error (MSE) exhibit unbounded sensitivity to outliers.
By Mainak Kundu, Ria Kanjilal, Ismail Uysal
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.
By Kabir Thayani