Customizing Student Networks From Heterogeneous Teachers via Adaptive Knowledge Amalgamation
This addresses the challenge of efficiently reusing diverse pre-trained models for selective tasks, though it is incremental in leveraging existing knowledge amalgamation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of training a customized student network from multiple heterogeneous pre-trained teachers without human annotations, achieving student performances that surpass those of the teachers on several datasets.
A massive number of well-trained deep networks have been released by developers online. These networks may focus on different tasks and in many cases are optimized for different datasets. In this paper, we study how to exploit such heterogeneous pre-trained networks, known as teachers, so as to train a customized student network that tackles a set of selective tasks defined by the user. We assume no human annotations are available, and each teacher may be either single- or multi-task. To this end, we introduce a dual-step strategy that first extracts the task-specific knowledge from the heterogeneous teachers sharing the same sub-task, and then amalgamates the extracted knowledge to build the student network. To facilitate the training, we employ a selective learning scheme where, for each unlabelled sample, the student learns adaptively from only the teacher with the least prediction ambiguity. We evaluate the proposed approach on several datasets and experimental results demonstrate that the student, learned by such adaptive knowledge amalgamation, achieves performances even better than those of the teachers.