Variational Student: Learning Compact and Sparser Networks in Knowledge Distillation Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces Variational Student, a method combining knowledge distillation and variational inference to create sparse, compact neural networks with significant memory savings and maintained accuracy, suitable for embedded devices.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach that integrates variational inference with knowledge distillation to produce highly sparse neural networks without retraining the teacher.

Findings

Achieves 64x and 213x memory reduction on LeNet and VGGNet.

Outperforms Bayesian methods in low-data scenarios.

Maintains high accuracy with minimal compromise.

Abstract

The holy grail in deep neural network research is porting the memory- and computation-intensive network models on embedded platforms with a minimal compromise in model accuracy. To this end, we propose a novel approach, termed as Variational Student, where we reap the benefits of compressibility of the knowledge distillation (KD) framework, and sparsity inducing abilities of variational inference (VI) techniques. Essentially, we build a sparse student network, whose sparsity is induced by the variational parameters found via optimizing a loss function based on VI, leveraging the knowledge learnt by an accurate but complex pre-trained teacher network. Further, for sparsity enhancement, we also employ a Block Sparse Regularizer on a concatenated tensor of teacher and student network weights. We demonstrate that the marriage of KD and the VI techniques inherits compression properties from the KD framework, and enhances levels of sparsity from the VI approach, with minimal compromise in the model accuracy. We benchmark our results on LeNet MLP and VGGNet (CNN) and illustrate a memory footprint reduction of 64x and 213x on these MLP and CNN variants, respectively, without a need to retrain the teacher network. Furthermore, in the low data regime, we observed that our method outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian techniques in terms of accuracy.