Pseudo-spherical Knowledge Distillation

Pseudo-spherical Knowledge Distillation

Kyungmin Lee, Hyeongkeun Lee

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3178-3184. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/441

Knowledge distillation aims to transfer the information by minimizing the cross-entropy between the probabilistic outputs of the teacher and student network. In this work, we propose an alternative distillation objective by maximizing the scoring rule, which quantitatively measures the agreement of a distribution to the reference distribution. We demonstrate that the proper and homogeneous scoring rule exhibits more preferable properties for distillation than the original cross entropy based approach. To that end, we present an efficient implementation of the distillation objective based on a pseudo-spherical scoring rule, which is a family of proper and homogeneous scoring rules. We refer to it as pseudo-spherical knowledge distillation. Through experiments on various model compression tasks, we validate the effectiveness of our method by showing its superiority over the original knowledge distillation. Moreover, together with structural distillation methods such as contrastive representation distillation, we achieve state of the art results in CIFAR100 benchmarks.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Probabilistic Machine Learning