Convolutional neural networks have been widely deployed in various application scenarios. In order to extend the applications' boundaries to some accuracy-crucial domains, researchers have been investigating approaches to boost accuracy through either deeper or wider network structures, which brings with them the exponential increment of the computational and storage cost, delaying the responding time. In this paper, we propose a general training framework named self distillation, which notably enhances the performance (accuracy) of convolutional neural networks through shrinking the size of the network rather than aggrandizing it. Different from traditional knowledge distillation - a knowledge transformation methodology among networks, which forces student neural networks to approximate the softmax layer outputs of pre-trained teacher neural networks, the proposed self distillation framework distills knowledge within network itself. The networks are firstly divided into several sections. Then the knowledge in the deeper portion of the networks is squeezed into the shallow ones. Experiments further prove the generalization of the proposed self distillation framework: enhancement of accuracy at average level is 2.65%, varying from 0.61% in ResNeXt as minimum to 4.07% in VGG19 as maximum. In addition, it can also provide flexibility of depth-wise scalable inference on resource-limited edge devices.Our codes will be released on github soon.

提出了一种名为“自蒸馏”的卷积神经网络训练框架，通过将网络大小缩小而不是扩大来显著提高卷积神经网络的性能（准确性）。它与传统的知识蒸馏不同，后者是将预训练的教师神经网络的输出作为softmax层输出的近似值强制学生神经网络去逼近。该框架将知识内化到网络本身，对深度方面的可伸缩推理提供了灵活性，能够在资源有限的边缘设备上运行。

自我蒸馏：通过蒸馏提高卷积神经网络性能