arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Relational Knowledge Distillation Brings DNN Representations Close Enough to Humans to Be Aligned Without Supervision

The study investigates whether transferring relational structure from human mental representations to deep neural networks (DNNs) can improve fine‑grained alignment between the two. Using unsupervised Gromov‑Wasserstein optimal transport, the authors show that fine‑tuning pre‑trained DNNs with Relational Knowledge Distillation (RKD) brings the networks close enough to human representations to align at the individual‑object level on a test set of concepts not seen during training. The improvement is driven mainly by a more human‑like global structure of category distances, while local nearest‑neighbor overlap remains largely unchanged.

By Yuria Shimizu, Soh Takahashi, Takato Horii, Masafumi Oizumi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

CLIP-RD: Relational Distillation for Efficient CLIP Knowledge Distillation

CLIP-RD introduces a relational distillation framework for efficient CLIP knowledge distillation, featuring Vertical Relational Distillation (VRD) and Cross Relational Distillation (XRD). VRD aligns intra‑modal similarity distributions between teacher and student, while XRD aligns cross‑modal similarity distributions to enforce bidirectional symmetry. This joint modeling of multidirectional relational structures improves the student’s embedding geometry, yielding a 1.8%p performance gain over CLIP‑KD across various architectures, tasks, and corruption settings with minimal training‑time overhead.

By Jeannie Chung, Hanna Jang, Ingyeong Yang, Uiwon Hwang, Jaehyeong Sim