Distilling a Deep Neural Network into a Takagi-Sugeno-Kang Fuzzy Inference System

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) demonstrate great success in classification tasks. However, they act as black boxes and we don't know how they make decisions in a particular classification task. To this end, we propose to distill the knowledge from a DNN into a fuzzy inference system (FIS), which is Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK)-type in this paper. The model has the capability to express the knowledge acquired by a DNN based on fuzzy rules, thus explaining a particular decision much easier. Knowledge distillation (KD) is applied to create a TSK-type FIS that generalizes better than one directly from the training data, which is guaranteed through experiments in this paper. To further improve the performances, we modify the baseline method of KD and obtain good results.