Teacher–student knowledge distillation based on decomposed deep feature representation for intelligent mobile applications

According to the recent studies on feature-based knowledge distillation (KD), a student model will not be able to imitate a teacher’s behavior properly if there is a high variance between the inner layers of the teacher and those of the student in terms of spatial shapes. This paper proposes a hypothesis that breaking down the knowledge of feature maps from a teacher’s inner layers and then distilling this knowledge into a student’s inner layers can bridge the gap between an advanced teacher and a student. Improving a student’s performance, this process can also help the student model better comprehend the knowledge. Hence, this paper embeds feature-based KD modules between a teacher model and a student model. In addition to extracting a tensor of feature maps in a teacher’s inner layers, these modules are responsible for breaking down this high-dimensional tensor through high-order rank singular value decomposition and then distilling the useful knowledge from the teacher’s feature maps into the student. According to various evaluations on two benchmark datasets in Experimental Results and Paired t-Test, adding the tensor decomposition approach to the feature-based KD module had a major role in enhancing the performance of a student model which showed competitive outputs in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.