Relation-Guided Adversarial Learning for Data-free Knowledge Transfer
This addresses the challenge of limited performance in data-free knowledge transfer for machine learning applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods by refining diversity and similarity aspects.
The paper tackles the problem of data homogeneity in data-free knowledge distillation by introducing a Relation-Guided Adversarial Learning method with triplet losses, which promotes intra-class diversity and inter-class confusion in generated samples, resulting in significant improvements in accuracy and data efficiency over previous state-of-the-art methods.
Data-free knowledge distillation transfers knowledge by recovering training data from a pre-trained model. Despite the recent success of seeking global data diversity, the diversity within each class and the similarity among different classes are largely overlooked, resulting in data homogeneity and limited performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel Relation-Guided Adversarial Learning method with triplet losses, which solves the homogeneity problem from two aspects. To be specific, our method aims to promote both intra-class diversity and inter-class confusion of the generated samples. To this end, we design two phases, an image synthesis phase and a student training phase. In the image synthesis phase, we construct an optimization process to push away samples with the same labels and pull close samples with different labels, leading to intra-class diversity and inter-class confusion, respectively. Then, in the student training phase, we perform an opposite optimization, which adversarially attempts to reduce the distance of samples of the same classes and enlarge the distance of samples of different classes. To mitigate the conflict of seeking high global diversity and keeping inter-class confusing, we propose a focal weighted sampling strategy by selecting the negative in the triplets unevenly within a finite range of distance. RGAL shows significant improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and data efficiency. Besides, RGAL can be inserted into state-of-the-art methods on various data-free knowledge transfer applications. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method on various tasks, specially data-free knowledge distillation, data-free quantization, and non-exemplar incremental learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sharpiless/RGAL.