用可学习的剪枝方法,让知识蒸馏更省数据更省算力。
Distill on a Diet: Efficient Knowledge Distillation via Learnable Data Pruning

- 引入影响函数与可学习采样策略,动态选择对蒸馏最有帮助的数据。
- 在多个数据集上,用更少数据和算力训练的学生模型超越全量数据蒸馏结果。
- 适合资源受限场景下高效训练轻量级模型的研究者和开发者。
知识蒸馏广泛用于在资源受限环境下获得紧凑模型以实现高效推理。然而,蒸馏过程本身的计算开销常被忽视。本文提出IF-Beta,一种结合影响函数与可学习采样策略的高效数据剪枝框架。实验证明,在仅有预训练教师模型的情况下,影响函数能有效且高效估计样本对蒸馏的影响。采样策略采用灵活的Beta分布参数化,适应多种剪枝比例。通过双层优化目标,内层在教师特征空间中进行快速代理训练,外层优化策略参数以最大化蒸馏性能。在CIFAR-10/100和ImageNet上的实验表明,IF-Beta在不同剪枝率下均优于基线方法。令人惊讶的是,使用更少数据和算力训练的学生模型性能超过全数据蒸馏的结果。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is widely used to obtain compact models for efficient inference in resource-constrained environments. Yet the computational overhead of the distillation process itself is often overlooked, raising the question of whether a better student model can be obtained with less data and less compute via data pruning. However, existing data pruning methods are not designed for KD: some introduce substantial overhead, such as obtaining training dynamics through retraining, while others rely on heuristic selection rules that fail to capture what KD actually requires, often resulting in suboptimal subsets. To address these issues, we propose IF-Beta, an efficient data pruning framework that combines influence functions with a learnable sampling policy. Empirically, we first demonstrate that influence functions can serve as an effective and efficient estimator of sample impact in KD settings, where only a pretrained teacher is available. Building on this, our sampling policy is specifically parameterized by a Beta distribution, whose highly flexible two-parameter family allows the policy to adapt to diverse pruning regimes rather than being tied to fixed heuristic forms. Next, we formulate KD pruning as optimizing this policy through a bilevel objective, where the inner loop operates in the teacher feature space with a KD-aligned objective, enabling fast proxy training, while the outer loop updates the policy parameters to maximize distillation performance. This design ensures that IF-Beta is both computationally efficient and inherently aligned with the goals of KD. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet show that IF-Beta consistently outperforms other baselines across a wide range of pruning ratios. Remarkably, IF-Beta enables students trained on less data and less compute to surpass the performance of students distilled on the full dataset.
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