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arXiv · 2507.23436

Beyond Linear Bottlenecks: Spline-Based Knowledge Distillation for Culturally Diverse Art Style Classification

Abdellah Zakaria Sellam·Salah Eddine Bekhouche·Cosimo Distante·Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed
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Abstract

Art style classification remains a formidable challenge in computational aesthetics due to the scarcity of expertly labeled datasets and the intricate, often nonlinear interplay of stylistic elements. While recent dual-teacher self-supervised frameworks reduce reliance on labeled data, their linear projection layers and localized focus struggle to model global compositional context and complex style-feature interactions. We enhance the dual-teacher knowledge distillation framework to address these limitations by replacing conventional MLP projection and prediction heads with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). Our approach retains complementary guidance from two teacher networks, one emphasizing localized texture and brushstroke patterns, the other capturing broader stylistic hierarchies while leveraging KANs' spline-based activations to model nonlinear feature correlations with mathematical precision. Experiments on WikiArt and Pandora18k demonstrate that our approach outperforms the base dual teacher architecture in Top-1 accuracy. Our findings highlight the importance of KANs in disentangling complex style manifolds, leading to better linear probe accuracy than MLP projections.

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Abdellah Zakaria Sellam, Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Cosimo Distante, Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed. 2025-07-31. Beyond Linear Bottlenecks: Spline-Based Knowledge Distillation for Culturally Diverse Art Style Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23436

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