LAKD-Activation Mapping Distillation Based on Local Learning
This work addresses interpretability and efficiency issues in knowledge distillation for vision models, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient and opaque knowledge transfer in knowledge distillation by proposing LAKD, a framework that uses local modules and activation mapping to decouple and integrate teacher knowledge, achieving state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets.
Knowledge distillation is widely applied in various fundamental vision models to enhance the performance of compact models. Existing knowledge distillation methods focus on designing different distillation targets to acquire knowledge from teacher models. However, these methods often overlook the efficient utilization of distilled information, crudely coupling different types of information, making it difficult to explain how the knowledge from the teacher network aids the student network in learning. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework, Local Attention Knowledge Distillation (LAKD), which more efficiently utilizes the distilled information from teacher networks, achieving higher interpretability and competitive performance. The framework establishes an independent interactive training mechanism through a separation-decoupling mechanism and non-directional activation mapping. LAKD decouples the teacher's features and facilitates progressive interaction training from simple to complex. Specifically, the student network is divided into local modules with independent gradients to decouple the knowledge transferred from the teacher. The non-directional activation mapping helps the student network integrate knowledge from different local modules by learning coarse-grained feature knowledge. We conducted experiments on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, and the results show that our LAKD method significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across different datasets.