# Multi-perspective Contrastive Logit Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10693 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10693/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 44 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Spatial Dimensions of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16302/) (2021)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TopKD: Top-scaled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04539/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In previous studies on knowledge distillation, the significance of logit distillation has frequently been overlooked. To revitalize logit distillation, we present a novel perspective by reconsidering its computation based on the semantic properties of logits and exploring how to utilize it more efficiently. Logits often contain a substantial amount of high-level semantic information; however, the conventional approach of employing logits to compute Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence does not account for their semantic properties. Furthermore, this direct KL divergence computation fails to fully exploit the potential of logits. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel and efficient logit distillation method, Multi-perspective Contrastive Logit Distillation (MCLD), which substantially improves the performance and efficacy of logit distillation. In comparison to existing logit distillation methods and complex feature distillation methods, MCLD attains state-of-the-art performance in image classification, and transfer learning tasks across multiple datasets, including CIFAR-100, ImageNet, Tiny-ImageNet, and STL-10. Additionally, MCLD exhibits superior training efficiency and outstanding performance with distilling on Vision Transformers, further emphasizing its notable advantages. This study unveils the vast potential of logits in knowledge distillation and seeks to offer valuable insights for future research.