Network Specialization via Feature-level Knowledge Distillation

State-of-the-art model specialization methods are mainly based on fine-tuning a pre-trained machine learning model to fit the specific needs of a particular task or application. Or by modifying the architecture of the model itself. However, these methods are not preferable in industrial applications because of the model’s large size and the complexity of the training process. In this paper, the difficulty of network specialization is attributed to overfitting caused by a lack of data, and we propose a novel model specialization method by Knowledge Distillation (SKD). The proposed methods merge transfer learning and model compression into one stage. Specifically, we distill and transfer knowledge at the feature map level, circumventing logit-level inconsistency between teacher and student. We empirically investigate and prove the effects of the three parts: Models can be specialized to customer use cases by knowledge distillation. Knowledge distillation can effectively regularize the knowledge transfer process to a smaller, task-specific model. Compared with classical methods such as training a model from scratch and model fine-tuning, our methods achieve comparable and much better results and have better training efficiency on the CIFAR-100 dataset for image classification tasks. This paper proves the great potential of model specialization by knowledge distillation.