Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved huge success in generating high-fidelity images, however, they suffer from low efficiency due to tremendous computational cost and bulky memory usage. Recent efforts on compression GANs show noticeable progress in obtaining smaller generators by sacrificing image quality or involving a time-consuming searching process. In this work, we aim to address these issues by introducing a teacher network that provides a search space in which efficient network architectures can be found, in addition to performing knowledge distillation. First, we revisit the search space of generative models, introducing an inception-based residual block into generators. Second, to achieve target computation cost, we propose a one-step pruning algorithm that searches a student architecture from the teacher model and substantially reduces searching cost. It requires no l1 sparsity regularization and its associated hyper-parameters, simplifying the training procedure. Finally, we propose to distill knowledge through maximizing feature similarity between teacher and student via an index named Global Kernel Alignment (GKA). Our compressed networks achieve similar or even better image fidelity (FID, mIoU) than the original models with much-reduced computational cost, e.g., MACs. Code will be released at https://github.com/snap-research/CAT.

通过引入教师网络，在搜索空间中查找高效的网络架构并进行知识蒸馏，该方法可以在更小的计算成本下实现类似于原始模型的图像质量，从而可能解决生成对抗网络的计算成本高的问题。

教师不仅仅教授：压缩图像到图像模型