Knowledge distillation in deep learning and its applications

Abstract

Deep learning based models are relatively large, and it is hard to deploy such models on resource-limited devices such as mobile phones and embedded devices. One possible solution is knowledge distillation whereby a smaller model (student model) is trained by utilizing the information from a larger model (teacher model). In this paper, we present an outlook of knowledge distillation techniques applied to deep learning models. To compare the performances of different techniques, we propose a new metric called distillation metric which compares different knowledge distillation solutions based on models' sizes and accuracy scores. Based on the survey, some interesting conclusions are drawn and presented in this paper including the current challenges and possible research directions.