# Multi-granularity for knowledge distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06681/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 36 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2021.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [Variational Information Distillation for Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05835/) (2019)
- [Omni-Scale Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00953/) (2019)
- [Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01802/) (2019)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03233/) (2018)
- [Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06473/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Representations with Probabilistic Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10837/) (2018)
- [Harmonious Attention Network for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08122/) (2018)
- [Cross-Layer Distillation with Semantic Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03236/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Soft Labels for Knowledge Distillation: A Bias-Variance Tradeoff Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00650/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Considering the fact that students have different abilities to understand the knowledge imparted by teachers, a multi-granularity distillation mechanism is proposed for transferring more understandable knowledge for student networks. A multi-granularity self-analyzing module of the teacher network is designed, which enables the student network to learn knowledge from different teaching patterns. Furthermore, a stable excitation scheme is proposed for robust supervision for the student training. The proposed distillation mechanism can be embedded into different distillation frameworks, which are taken as baselines. Experiments show the mechanism improves the accuracy by 0.58% on average and by 1.08% in the best over the baselines, which makes its performance superior to the state-of-the-arts. It is also exploited that the student's ability of fine-tuning and robustness to noisy inputs can be improved via the proposed mechanism. The code is available at https://github.com/shaoeric/multi-granularity-distillation.