We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for improving the robustness of vision models through the combination of knowledge distillation and data augmentation. We address the conjecture that larger models do not make for better teachers by showing strong gains in out-of-distribution robustness when distilling from pretrained foundation models. Following this finding, we propose Discrete Adversarial Distillation (DAD), which leverages a robust teacher to generate adversarial examples and a VQGAN to discretize them, creating more informative samples than standard data augmentation techniques. We provide a theoretical framework for the use of a robust teacher in the knowledge distillation with data augmentation setting and demonstrate strong gains in out-of-distribution robustness and clean accuracy across different student architectures. Notably, our method adds minor computational overhead compared to similar techniques and can be easily combined with other data augmentations for further improvements.

通过知识蒸馏和数据增强的结合，提出了一个概念简单且轻量级的框架来提高视觉模型的鲁棒性。通过从预训练的基础模型进行蒸馏，我们得出了大型模型并不一定会成为更好的教师的推测并在分布外鲁棒性上取得了显著的改进。基于这一发现，我们提出了离散对抗蒸馏（DAD）的方法，利用鲁棒的教师生成对抗样本并使用VQGAN对其离散化，相比于标准的数据增强技术，生成的样本更具信息量。我们提供了一个理论框架来解释在具有数据增强的知识蒸馏中使用鲁棒的教师，并在不同的学生架构中展示了分布外鲁棒性和净精确度的显著改进。值得注意的是，我们的方法与类似技术相比只增加了较小的计算开销，并且可以轻松与其他数据增强技术结合以进一步提高性能。

从视觉语言基础模型中提取出超出分布鲁棒性