AMLN: Adversarial-Based Mutual Learning Network for Online Knowledge Distillation

Abstract

Online knowledge distillation has attracted increasing interest recently, which jointly learns teacher and student models or an ensemble of student models simultaneously and collaboratively. On the other hand, existing works focus more on outcome-driven learning according to knowledge like classification probabilities whereas the distilling processes which capture rich and useful intermediate features and information are largely neglected. In this work, we propose an innovative adversarial-based mutual learning network (AMLN) that introduces process-driven learning beyond outcome-driven learning for augmented online knowledge distillation. A block-wise training module is designed which guides the information flow and mutual learning among peer networks adversarially throughout different learning stages, and this spreads until the final network layer which captures more high-level information. AMLN has been evaluated under a variety of network architectures over three widely used benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments show that AMLN achieves superior performance consistently against state-of-the-art knowledge transfer methods.