Decoupled Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss
Jiequan Cui Zhuotao Tian Zhisheng Zhong Xiaojuan Qi Bei Yu Hanwang Zhang
In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss
and observe that it is equivalent to the Doupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL)
Divergence loss that consists of 1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss
and 2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. From our analysis of the
DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the
limitation of DKL in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its
asymmetry property in training optimization. This modification ensures that the
wMSE component is always effective during training, providing extra
constructive cues. Secondly, we introduce global information into DKL for
intra-class consistency regularization. With these two enhancements, we derive
the Improved Kullback-Leibler (IKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its
effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets,
focusing on adversarial training and knowledge distillation tasks. The proposed
approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both tasks, demonstrating
the substantial practical merits. Code and models will be available soon at
https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.