Asymmetric Decision-Making in Online Knowledge Distillation:Unifying Consensus and Divergence

Online Knowledge Distillation (OKD) methods streamline the distillation training process into a single stage, eliminating the need for knowledge transfer from a pretrained teacher network to a more compact student network. This paper presents an innovative approach to leverage intermediate spatial representations. Our analysis of the intermediate features from both teacher and student models reveals two pivotal insights: (1) the similar features between students and teachers are predominantly focused on foreground objects. (2) teacher models emphasize foreground objects more than students. Building on these findings, we propose Asymmetric Decision-Making (ADM) to enhance feature consensus learning for student models while continuously promoting feature diversity in teacher models. Specifically, Consensus Learning for student models prioritizes spatial features with high consensus relative to teacher models. Conversely, Divergence Learning for teacher models highlights spatial features with lower similarity compared to student models, indicating superior performance by teacher models in these regions. Consequently, ADM facilitates the student models to catch up with the feature learning process of the teacher models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADM consistently surpasses existing OKD methods across various online knowledge distillation settings and also achieves superior results when applied to offline knowledge distillation, semantic segmentation and diffusion distillation tasks.

Zhaowei Chen, Borui Zhao, Yuchen Ge, Yuhao Chen, Renjie Song, Jiajun Liang · 2025