DOT: A Distillation-Oriented Trainer
Borui Zhao Quan Cui Renjie Song Jiajun Liang
Knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from a large model to a small one
via task and distillation losses. In this paper, we observe a trade-off between
task and distillation losses, i.e., introducing distillation loss limits the
convergence of task loss. We believe that the trade-off results from the
insufficient optimization of distillation loss. The reason is: The teacher has
a lower task loss than the student, and a lower distillation loss drives the
student more similar to the teacher, then a better-converged task loss could be
obtained. To break the trade-off, we propose the Distillation-Oriented Trainer
(DOT). DOT separately considers gradients of task and distillation losses, then
applies a larger momentum to distillation loss to accelerate its optimization.
We empirically prove that DOT breaks the trade-off, i.e., both losses are
sufficiently optimized. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of DOT.
Notably, DOT achieves a +2.59% accuracy improvement on ImageNet-1k for the
ResNet50-MobileNetV1 pair. Conclusively, DOT greatly benefits the student's
optimization properties in terms of loss convergence and model generalization.
Code will be made publicly available.