Does knowledge distillation have an ensemble effect?
I don't know much about knowledge distillation.
I have a one question.
There is a model with showing 99% performance(10class image classification). But I can't use a bigger model because I have to keep inference time.
Does it have an ensemble effect if I train knowledge distillation using another big model?
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Or let me know if there's any way to improve performance than this.
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The technical answer is no. KD is a different technique from ensembling.
But they are related in the sense that KD was originally proposed to distill larger models, and the authors specifically cite ensemble models as the type of larger model they experimented on.
Net net, give KD a try on your big model to see if you can keep a lot of the performance of the bigger model but with the size of the smaller model. I have empirically found that you can retain 75%-80% of the power of the a 5x larger model after distilling it down to the smaller model.
From the abstract of the KD paper:
A very simple way to improve the performance of almost any machine learning algorithm is to train many different models on the same data and then to average their predictions. Unfortunately, making predictions using a whole ensemble of models is cumbersome and may be too computationally expensive to allow deployment to a large number of users, especially if the individual models are large neural nets. Caruana and his collaborators have shown that it is possible to compress the knowledge in an ensemble into a single model which is much easier to deploy and we develop this approach further using a different compression technique. We achieve some surprising results on MNIST and we show that we can significantly improve the acoustic model of a heavily used commercial system by distilling the knowledge in an ensemble of models into a single model. We also introduce a new type of ensemble composed of one or more full models and many specialist models which learn to distinguish fine-grained classes that the full models confuse. Unlike a mixture of experts, these specialist models can be trained rapidly and in parallel.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531
