Embedded Knowledge Distillation in Depth-Level Dynamic Neural Network

In real applications, different computation-resource devices need different-depth networks (e.g., ResNet-18/34/50) with high-accuracy. Usually, existing methods either design multiple networks and train them independently, or construct depth-level/width-level dynamic neural networks which is hard to prove the accuracy of each sub-net. In this article, we propose an elegant Depth-Level Dynamic Neural Network (DDNN) integrated different-depth sub-nets of similar architectures. To improve the generalization of sub-nets, we design the Embedded-Knowledge-Distillation (EKD) training mechanism for the DDNN to implement knowledge transfer from the teacher (full-net) to multiple students (sub-nets). Specifically, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is introduced to constrain the posterior class probability consistency between full-net and sub-nets, and self-attention distillation on the same resolution feature of different depth is addressed to drive more abundant feature representations of sub-nets. Thus, we can obtain multiple high-accuracy sub-nets simultaneously in a DDNN via the online knowledge distillation in each training iteration without extra computation cost. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that sub-nets in DDNN with EKD training achieve better performance than individually training networks while preserving the original performance of full-nets.