The tremendous success of large models trained on extensive datasets demonstrates that scale is a key ingredient in achieving superior results. Therefore, the reflection on the rationality of designing knowledge distillation (KD) approaches for limited-capacity architectures solely based on small-scale datasets is now deemed imperative. In this paper, we identify the \emph{small data pitfall} that presents in previous KD methods, which results in the underestimation of the power of vanilla KD framework on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Specifically, we show that employing stronger data augmentation techniques and using larger datasets can directly decrease the gap between vanilla KD and other meticulously designed KD variants. This highlights the necessity of designing and evaluating KD approaches in the context of practical scenarios, casting off the limitations of small-scale datasets. Our investigation of the vanilla KD and its variants in more complex schemes, including stronger training strategies and different model capacities, demonstrates that vanilla KD is elegantly simple but astonishingly effective in large-scale scenarios. Without bells and whistles, we obtain state-of-the-art ResNet-50, ViT-S, and ConvNeXtV2-T models for ImageNet, which achieve 83.1\%, 84.3\%, and 85.0\% top-1 accuracy, respectively. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/Hao840/vanillaKD.

本文发现了先前知识蒸馏方法中存在的小数据陷阱并证明了对于大规模数据集，纯粹的知识蒸馏框架可以用更强的数据增强技术和使用更大的数据集来缩小与其他知识蒸馏方法之间的差距，从而使其在大规模情况下效果惊人。

VanillaKD: 从小规模到大规模重返纯净知识蒸馏的威力