# Uncertainty-Aware Dual-Student Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18826 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18826/

## 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 5 of its 6 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Knowledge distillation has emerged as a powerful technique for model compression, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large teacher networks to compact student models. However, traditional knowledge distillation methods treat all teacher predictions equally, regardless of the teacher's confidence in those predictions. This paper proposes an uncertainty-aware dual-student knowledge distillation framework that leverages teacher prediction uncertainty to selectively guide student learning. We introduce a peer-learning mechanism where two heterogeneous student architectures, specifically ResNet-18 and MobileNetV2, learn collaboratively from both the teacher network and each other. Experimental results on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to baseline knowledge distillation methods, with ResNet-18 achieving 83.84% top-1 accuracy and MobileNetV2 achieving 81.46% top-1 accuracy, representing improvements of 2.04% and 0.92% respectively over traditional single-student distillation approaches.