用鲁棒统计方法改进知识蒸馏,让小模型学得更准更快。
REDistill: Robust Estimator Distillation for Balancing Robustness and Efficiency
- 用幂发散损失替代传统蒸馏目标,自动弱化噪声教师输出
- 在CIFAR-100和ImageNet上提升学生模型准确率,无需调参
- 兼容现有流程、计算开销极小,适合跨架构通用蒸馏
知识蒸馏通过对齐师生模型的预测分布,将大模型知识迁移到小模型。然而,传统基于KL散度的蒸馏方法假设教师输出可靠,实际中教师预测常含噪声或过度自信。现有修正方法依赖经验性启发式和大量超参数调优,泛化能力差。本文提出REDistill(鲁棒估计器蒸馏),基于鲁棒统计构建统一框架。它用幂发散损失替代标准KD目标,可自适应地降低不可靠教师输出的影响,同时保留有意义的logit关系。该方法仅需logits,与现有蒸馏流程无缝集成,计算开销可忽略。在CIFAR-100和ImageNet-1k上的大量实验表明,REDistill在多种师生架构组合下均显著提升学生模型准确率,且无需针对特定模型调参,展现出强鲁棒性与泛化能力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student by aligning their predictive distributions. However, conventional KD formulations - typically based on Kullback-Leibler divergence - assume that the teacher provides reliable soft targets. In practice, teacher predictions are often noisy or overconfident, and existing correction-based approaches rely on ad-hoc heuristics and extensive hyper-parameter tuning, which hinders generalization. We introduce REDistill (Robust Estimator Distillation), a simple yet principled framework grounded in robust statistics. REDistill replaces the standard KD objective with a power divergence loss, a generalization of KL divergence that adaptively downweights unreliable teacher output while preserving informative logit relationships. This formulation provides a unified and interpretable treatment of teacher noise, requires only logits, integrates seamlessly into existing KD pipelines, and incurs negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1k demonstrate that REDistill consistently improves student accuracy in diverse teacher-student architectures. Remarkably, it achieves these gains without model-specific hyper-parameter tuning, underscoring its robustness and strong generalization to unseen teacher-student pairs.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。