Distillation from heterogeneous unlabeled collections

Compressing deep networks is essential to expand their range of applications to constrained settings. The need for compression however often arises long after the model was trained, when the original data might no longer be available. On the other hand, unlabeled data, not necessarily related to the target task, is usually plentiful, especially in image classification tasks. In this work, we propose a scheme to leverage such samples to distill the knowledge learned by a large teacher network to a smaller student. The proposed technique relies on (i) preferentially sampling datapoints that appear related, and (ii) taking better advantage of the learning signal. We show that the former speeds up the student's convergence, while the latter boosts its performance, achieving performances closed to what can be expected with the original data.

Jean-Michel Begon, Pierre Geurts · 2022