Exclusivity-Consistency Regularized Knowledge Distillation for Face Recognition

Abstract

Knowledge distillation is an effective tool to compress large pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or their ensembles into models applicable to mobile and embedded devices. The success of which mainly comes from two aspects: the designed student network and the exploited knowledge. However, current methods usually suffer from the low-capability of mobile-level student network and the unsatisfactory knowledge for distillation. In this paper, we propose a novel position-aware exclusivity to encourage large diversity among different filters of the same layer to alleviate the low-capability of student network. Moreover, we investigate the effect of several prevailing knowledge for face recognition distillation and conclude that the knowledge of feature consistency is more flexible and preserves much more information than others. Experiments on a variety of face recognition benchmarks have revealed the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-arts.