Learning from Stochastic Teacher Representations Using Student-Guided Knowledge Distillation

Advances in self-distillation have shown that when knowledge is distilled from a teacher to a student using the same deep learning (DL) model, student performance can surpass the teacher, particularly when the model is over-parameterized and the teacher is trained with early stopping. Alternatively, ensemble learning also improves performance, although training, storing, and deploying multiple DL models becomes impractical as the number of models grows. Even distilling a deep ensemble to a single student model or weight averaging methods first requires training of multiple teacher models and does not fully leverage the inherent stochasticity for generating and distilling diversity in DL models. These constraints are particularly prohibitive in resource-constrained or latency-sensitive applications on, e.g., wearable devices. This paper proposes to train only one model and generate multiple diverse teacher representations using distillation-time dropout. However, generating these representations stochastically leads to noisy representations that are misaligned with the learned task. To overcome this problem, a novel stochastic self-distillation (SSD) training strategy is introduced for filtering and weighting teacher representation to distill from task-relevant representations only, using student-guided knowledge distillation. The student representation at each distillation step is used to guide the distillation process. Experimental results⁴(Code and supplementary available at: https://github.com/haseebaslam95/SSD) on real-world affective computing, wearable/biosignal (UCR Archive), HAR, and image classification datasets show that the proposed SSD method can outperform state-of-the-art methods without increasing the model size at both training and testing time. It incurs negligible computational complexity compared to ensemble learning and weight averaging methods.