Enhancing deep feature representation in self-knowledge distillation via pyramid feature refinement

Abstract

In recent years, various self-knowledge distillation approaches have been proposed to reduce the cost of training teacher networks. However, these methods often overlook the significance of deep features. To address this limitation and strengthen the capability of deep features while preserving the ability of shallow features, we propose performing Self-Knowledge Distillation via Pyramid Feature Refinement (PR-SKD). Inspired by the representation learning characteristics of deep neural networks, PR-SKD builds a cohort of sub-networks with a pyramid architecture to hierarchically transfer refined information to the target network. According to the different contributions and functions between deep and shallow feature maps, our PR-SKD fully utilizes feature information to improve deep feature representation ability without compromising the capability of shallow feature maps. Extensive experiments on various image classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over widely used state-of-the-art knowledge distillation methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/wo16pao/PR-SKD.