# SDAKD: Student Discriminator Assisted Knowledge Distillation for Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03870 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03870/

## 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 32 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10225/) (2018)
- [Synthetic Data Augmentation using GAN for Improved Liver Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02385/) (2018)
- [Masked Generative Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01529/) (2022)
- [Long Text Generation via Adversarial Training with Leaked Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08624/) (2017)
- [AutoGAN-Distiller: Searching to Compress Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08198/) (2020)
- [GAN Slimming: All-in-One GAN Compression by A Unified Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11062/) (2020)
- [Wavelet Knowledge Distillation: Towards Efficient Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06321/) (2022)
- [GCFSR: a Generative and Controllable Face Super Resolution Method Without Facial and GAN Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07319/) (2022)
- [Teachers Do More Than Teach: Compressing Image-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03467/) (2021)
- [Co-Evolutionary Compression for Unpaired Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10804/) (2019)
- [Online Multi-Granularity Distillation for GAN Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06908/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Discriminator in GAN Compression: A Generator-discriminator Cooperative Compression Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14439/) (2021)
- [Learning Efficient GANs for Image Translation via Differentiable Masks and co-Attention Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08382/) (2020)
- [A survey on GANs for computer vision: Recent research, analysis and taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11242/) (2022)
- [Ten Years of Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs): A survey of the state-of-the-art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16316/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) achieve excellent performance in generative tasks, such as image super-resolution, but their computational requirements make difficult their deployment on resource-constrained devices. While knowledge distillation is a promising research direction for GAN compression, effectively training a smaller student generator is challenging due to the capacity mismatch between the student generator and the teacher discriminator. In this work, we propose Student Discriminator Assisted Knowledge Distillation (SDAKD), a novel GAN distillation methodology that introduces a student discriminator to mitigate this capacity mismatch. SDAKD follows a three-stage training strategy, and integrates an adapted feature map distillation approach in its last two training stages. We evaluated SDAKD on two well-performing super-resolution GANs, GCFSR and Real-ESRGAN. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baselines and SOTA GAN knowledge distillation methods. The SDAKD source code will be made openly available upon acceptance of the paper.