# Dynamic Temperature Scheduler for Knowledge Distillation

Source: [Dynamic Temperature Scheduler for Knowledge Distillation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/691d4ef0d6b0dd334292d59d>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-11-20T05:02:43.106Z

Authors: Sibgat Ul Islam, Jawad Ibn Ahad, Fuad Rahman, Mohammad Ruhul Amin, Nabeel Mohammed, Shafin Rahman

Published: 2025-11-14T16:03:22.000Z

## Abstract

Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller student model using a large, pre-trained teacher model, with temperature as a key hyperparameter controlling the softness of output probabilities. Traditional methods use a fixed temperature throughout training, which is suboptimal. Moreover, architectural differences between teacher and student often result in mismatched logit magnitudes. We demonstrate that students benefit from softer probabilities early in training but require sharper probabilities in later stages. We introduce Dynamic Temperature Scheduler (DTS), which adjusts temperature dynamically based on the cross-entropy loss gap between teacher and student. To our knowledge, this is the first temperature scheduling method that adapts based on the divergence between teacher and student distributions. Our method integrates seamlessly with existing KD frameworks. We validate DTS across multiple KD strategies on vision (CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet) and NLP tasks (GLUE, Dolly, SelfIns, UnNI, S-NI), consistently outperforming static-temperature baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Sibgat-Ul/DTS.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13767>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13767.pdf>)
