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arXiv · 2106.01489

Not All Knowledge Is Created Equal: Mutual Distillation of Confident Knowledge

Ziyun Li·Xinshao Wang·Di Hu·Neil M. Robertson·David A. Clifton·Christoph Meinel·Haojin Yang
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Abstract

Mutual knowledge distillation (MKD) improves a model by distilling knowledge from another model. However, \textit{not all knowledge is certain and correct}, especially under adverse conditions. For example, label noise usually leads to less reliable models due to undesired memorization \cite{zhang2017understanding,arpit2017closer}. Wrong knowledge misleads the learning rather than helps. This problem can be handled by two aspects: (i) improving the reliability of a model where the knowledge is from (i.e., knowledge source's reliability); (ii) selecting reliable knowledge for distillation. In the literature, making a model more reliable is widely studied while selective MKD receives little attention. Therefore, we focus on studying selective MKD. Concretely, a generic MKD framework, \underline{C}onfident knowledge selection followed by \underline{M}utual \underline{D}istillation (CMD), is designed. The key component of CMD is a generic knowledge selection formulation, making the selection threshold either static (CMD-S) or progressive (CMD-P). Additionally, CMD covers two special cases: zero-knowledge and all knowledge, leading to a unified MKD framework. Extensive experiments are present to demonstrate the effectiveness of CMD and thoroughly justify the design of CMD. For example, CMD-P obtains new state-of-the-art results in robustness against label noise.

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Ziyun Li, Xinshao Wang, Di Hu, Neil M. Robertson, David A. Clifton, Christoph Meinel, Haojin Yang. 2021-06-02. Not All Knowledge Is Created Equal: Mutual Distillation of Confident Knowledge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01489

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