Sequential Knowledge Transfer in Teacher-Student Framework Using Densely Distilled Flow-Based Information

Abstract

This paper proposes an iterative sequential knowledge transfer (KT) technique suitable for teacher-student framework (TSF)-based image classification when a state-of-the-art residual network (ResNet) is used for the TSF. To this end, we first extracted densely distilled knowledge in terms of the flow between the layers in the teacher ResNet. Subsequently, we iteratively and sequentially trained the student ResNet using the densely extracted flow-based teacher information. When using the proposed method, the trained student ResNet exhibited better performance in terms of classification accuracy and fast learning than the existing TSF-based KT methods considered in this study.