There is a growing discrepancy in computer vision between large-scale models that achieve state-of-the-art performance and models that are affordable in practical applications. In this paper we address this issue and significantly bridge the gap between these two types of models. Throughout our empirical investigation we do not aim to necessarily propose a new method, but strive to identify a robust and effective recipe for making state-of-the-art large scale models affordable in practice. We demonstrate that, when performed correctly, knowledge distillation can be a powerful tool for reducing the size of large models without compromising their performance. In particular, we uncover that there are certain implicit design choices, which may drastically affect the effectiveness of distillation. Our key contribution is the explicit identification of these design choices, which were not previously articulated in the literature. We back up our findings by a comprehensive empirical study, demonstrate compelling results on a wide range of vision datasets and, in particular, obtain a state-of-the-art ResNet-50 model for ImageNet, which achieves 82.8\% top-1 accuracy.

本文介绍了一种用于减小大规模计算机视觉模型尺寸、同时不影响性能的知识蒸馏方法，并且明确了影响该方法有效性的设计选择。通过全面的实验研究，我们在多种视觉数据集上获得了令人信服的结果，并实现了在ImageNet数据集上的ResNet-50模型的最新表现，其top-1准确率为82.8％。

知识蒸馏：好老师耐心且一致