arXiv AI By Mohamed Amine Kina

On the Failure of Boundary-Seeking Distillation in Bottlenecked Generative Architectures

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2607. 15919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation transfers the knowledge encoded in a teacher model to a student model without access to the original training data.

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arXiv AI
Aug 11

UniDFKD: A Unified Semantic Prior Framework for Architecture-Agnostic Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

arXiv:2608. 09287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) transfers knowledge from a pretrained teacher model to a compact student model by synthesizing semantically informative data, eliminating the need for access to the original training dataset.

By Xuewan He, Tong Chu, Zihan Cheng, Yuchen Su, Qianxin Xia, Guoming Lu, Jielei Wang, Wen Li
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