ReffAKD: Resource-efficient Autoencoder-based Knowledge Distillation

In this research, we propose an innovative method to boost Knowledge Distillation efficiency without the need for resource-heavy teacher models. Knowledge Distillation trains a smaller ``student'' model with guidance from a larger ``teacher'' model, which is computationally costly. However, the main benefit comes from the soft labels provided by the teacher, helping the student grasp nuanced class similarities. In our work, we propose an efficient method for generating these soft labels, thereby eliminating the need for a large teacher model. We employ a compact autoencoder to extract essential features and calculate similarity scores between different classes. Afterward, we apply the softmax function to these similarity scores to obtain a soft probability vector. This vector serves as valuable guidance during the training of the student model. Our extensive experiments on various datasets, including CIFAR-100, Tiny Imagenet, and Fashion MNIST, demonstrate the superior resource efficiency of our approach compared to traditional knowledge distillation methods that rely on large teacher models. Importantly, our approach consistently achieves similar or even superior performance in terms of model accuracy. We also perform a comparative study with various techniques recently developed for knowledge distillation showing our approach achieves competitive performance with using significantly less resources. We also show that our approach can be easily added to any logit based knowledge distillation method. This research contributes to making knowledge distillation more accessible and cost-effective for practical applications, making it a promising avenue for improving the efficiency of model training. The code for this work is available at, https://github.com/JEKimLab/ReffAKD.