Improve Knowledge Distillation via Label Revision and Data Selection

Knowledge distillation (KD) transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a lightweight student one has received great attention in deep model compression. In addition to the supervision of ground truth, the vanilla KD method regards the predictions of the teacher as soft labels to supervise the training of the student model. Based on vanilla KD, various approaches have been developed to improve the performance of the student model further. However, few of these previous methods have considered the reliability of the supervision from teacher models. Supervision from erroneous predictions may mislead the training of the student model. This article therefore proposes to tackle this problem from two aspects: label revision to rectify the incorrect supervision and data selection to select appropriate samples for distillation to reduce the impact of erroneous supervision. In the former, we propose to rectify the teacher’s inaccurate predictions using the ground truth. In the latter, we introduce a data selection technique to choose suitable training samples to be supervised by the teacher, thereby reducing the impact of incorrect predictions to some extent. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can be further combined with other distillation approaches to enhance their performance.