Cross-Architecture Distillation Made Simple with Redundancy Suppression

Weijia Zhang; Yuehao Liu; Wu Ran; Chao Ma

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arXiv · 2507.21844

Cross-Architecture Distillation Made Simple with Redundancy Suppression

Weijia Zhang·Yuehao Liu·Wu Ran·Chao Ma

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Abstract

We describe a simple method for cross-architecture knowledge distillation, where the knowledge transfer is cast into a redundant information suppression formulation. Existing methods introduce sophisticated modules, architecture-tailored designs, and excessive parameters, which impair their efficiency and applicability. We propose to extract the architecture-agnostic knowledge in heterogeneous representations by reducing the redundant architecture-exclusive information. To this end, we present a simple redundancy suppression distillation (RSD) loss, which comprises cross-architecture invariance maximisation and feature decorrelation objectives. To prevent the student from entirely losing its architecture-specific capabilities, we further design a lightweight module that decouples the RSD objective from the student's internal representations. Our method is devoid of the architecture-specific designs and complex operations in the pioneering method of OFA. It outperforms OFA on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1k benchmarks with only a fraction of their parameter overhead, which highlights its potential as a simple and strong baseline to the cross-architecture distillation community.

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Weijia Zhang, Yuehao Liu, Wu Ran, Chao Ma. 2025-07-29. Cross-Architecture Distillation Made Simple with Redundancy Suppression. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21844

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