knowledge-distillation-pytorch

• Exploring knowledge distillation of DNNs for efficient hardware solutions
• Author: Haitong Li
• Framework: PyTorch
• Dataset: CIFAR-10

Features

• A framework for exploring "shallow" and "deep" knowledge distillation (KD) experiments
• Hyperparameters defined by "params.json" universally (avoiding long argparser commands)
• Hyperparameter searching and result synthesizing (as a table)
• Progress bar, tensorboard support, and checkpoint saving/loading (utils.py)
• Pretrained teacher models available for download

Install

• Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/peterliht/knowledge-distillation-pytorch.git

• Install the dependencies (including Pytorch) pip install -r requirements.txt

Organizatoin:

• ./train.py: main entrance for train/eval with or without KD on CIFAR-10
• ./experiments/: json files for each experiment; dir for hypersearch
• ./model/: teacher and student DNNs, knowledge distillation (KD) loss defination, dataloader

Key notes about usage for your experiments:

• Download the zip file for pretrained teacher model checkpoints from this Box folder
• Simply move the unzipped subfolders into 'knowledge-distillation-pytorch/experiments/' (replacing the existing ones if necessary; follow the default path naming)
• Call train.py to start training 5-layer CNN with ResNet-18's dark knowledge, or training ResNet-18 with state-of-the-art deeper models distilled
• Use search_hyperparams.py for hypersearch
• Hyperparameters are defined in params.json files universally. Refer to the header of search_hyperparams.py for details

Train (dataset: CIFAR-10)

Note: all the hyperparameters can be found and modified in 'params.json' under 'model_dir'

-- Train a 5-layer CNN with knowledge distilled from a pre-trained ResNet-18 model

python train.py --model_dir experiments/cnn_distill

-- Train a ResNet-18 model with knowledge distilled from a pre-trained ResNext-29 teacher

python train.py --model_dir experiments/resnet18_distill/resnext_teacher

-- Hyperparameter search for a specified experiment ('parent_dir/params.json')

python search_hyperparams.py --parent_dir experiments/cnn_distill_alpha_temp

--Synthesize results of the recent hypersearch experiments

python synthesize_results.py --parent_dir experiments/cnn_distill_alpha_temp

Results

Quick takeaways (more details to be added):

• Knowledge distillation provides regularization for both shallow DNNs and state-of-the-art DNNs
• KD can also help in the scenarios of using unlabeled dataset and small amount of data for training

References

Hinton, Geoffrey, Oriol Vinyals, and Jeff Dean. "Distilling the knowledge in a neural network." arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.02531 (2015).

Romero, A., Ballas, N., Kahou, S. E., Chassang, A., Gatta, C., & Bengio, Y. (2014). Fitnets: Hints for thin deep nets. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6550.

https://github.com/cs230-stanford/cs230-stanford.github.io

https://github.com/bearpaw/pytorch-classification