TY - GEN
T1 - Revisit the Power of Vanilla Knowledge Distillation
T2 - 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023
AU - Hao, Zhiwei
AU - Guo, Jianyuan
AU - Han, Kai
AU - Hu, Han
AU - Xu, Chang
AU - Wang, Yunhe
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - The tremendous success of large models trained on extensive datasets demonstrates that scale is a key ingredient in achieving superior results. Therefore, the reflection on the rationality of designing knowledge distillation (KD) approaches for limited-capacity architectures solely based on small-scale datasets is now deemed imperative. In this paper, we identify the small data pitfall that presents in previous KD methods, which results in the underestimation of the power of vanilla KD framework on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Specifically, we show that employing stronger data augmentation techniques and using larger datasets can directly decrease the gap between vanilla KD and other meticulously designed KD variants. This highlights the necessity of designing and evaluating KD approaches in the context of practical scenarios, casting off the limitations of small-scale datasets. Our investigation of the vanilla KD and its variants in more complex schemes, including stronger training strategies and different model capacities, demonstrates that vanilla KD is elegantly simple but astonishingly effective in large-scale scenarios. Without bells and whistles, we obtain state-of-the-art ResNet-50, ViT-S, and ConvNeXtV2-T models for ImageNet, which achieve 83.1%, 84.3%, and 85.0% top-1 accuracy, respectively. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/Hao840/vanillaKD.
AB - The tremendous success of large models trained on extensive datasets demonstrates that scale is a key ingredient in achieving superior results. Therefore, the reflection on the rationality of designing knowledge distillation (KD) approaches for limited-capacity architectures solely based on small-scale datasets is now deemed imperative. In this paper, we identify the small data pitfall that presents in previous KD methods, which results in the underestimation of the power of vanilla KD framework on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Specifically, we show that employing stronger data augmentation techniques and using larger datasets can directly decrease the gap between vanilla KD and other meticulously designed KD variants. This highlights the necessity of designing and evaluating KD approaches in the context of practical scenarios, casting off the limitations of small-scale datasets. Our investigation of the vanilla KD and its variants in more complex schemes, including stronger training strategies and different model capacities, demonstrates that vanilla KD is elegantly simple but astonishingly effective in large-scale scenarios. Without bells and whistles, we obtain state-of-the-art ResNet-50, ViT-S, and ConvNeXtV2-T models for ImageNet, which achieve 83.1%, 84.3%, and 85.0% top-1 accuracy, respectively. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/Hao840/vanillaKD.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85191194896
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85191194896
T3 - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
BT - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 - 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2023
A2 - Oh, A.
A2 - Neumann, T.
A2 - Globerson, A.
A2 - Saenko, K.
A2 - Hardt, M.
A2 - Levine, S.
PB - Neural information processing systems foundation
Y2 - 10 December 2023 through 16 December 2023
ER -