# Dual-Forward Path Teacher Knowledge Distillation: Bridging the Capacity Gap Between Teacher and Student

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 58 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [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)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [On the Efficacy of Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01348/) (2019)
- [Variational Information Distillation for Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05835/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12171/) (2026)
- [LIFT and PLACE: A Simple, Stable, and Effective Knowledge Distillation Framework for Lightweight Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19729/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge distillation (KD) provides an effective way to improve the performance of a student network under the guidance of pre-trained teachers. However, this approach usually brings in a large capacity gap between teacher and student networks, limiting the distillation gains. Previous methods addressing this problem either discard accurate knowledge representation or fail to dynamically adjust the transferred knowledge, which is less effective in addressing the capacity gap problem and hinders students from achieving comparable performance with the pre-trained teacher. In this work, we extend the ideology of prompt-based learning to address the capacity gap problem, and propose Dual-Forward Path Teacher Knowledge Distillation (DFPT-KD), which replaces the pre-trained teacher with a novel dual-forward path teacher to supervise the learning of student. The key to DFPT-KD is prompt-based tuning, i.e., establishing an additional prompt-based forward path within the pre-trained teacher and optimizing it with the pre-trained teacher frozen to make the transferred knowledge compatible with the representation ability of the student. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DFPT-KD leads to trained students performing better than the vanilla KD. To make the transferred knowledge better compatible with the representation abilities of the student, we further fine-tune the whole prompt-based forward path, yielding a novel distillation approach dubbed DFPT-KD+. By extensive experiments, it is shown that DFPT-KD+ improves upon DFPT-KD and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy performance.