Local Dense Logit Relations for Enhanced Knowledge Distillation

Abstract: State-of-the-art logit distillation methods exhibit versatility, simplicity, and efficiency. Despite the advances, existing studies have yet to delve thoroughly into fine-grained relationships within logit knowledge. In this paper, we propose Local Dense Relational Logit Distillation (LDRLD), a novel method that captures inter-class relationships through recursively decoupling and recombining logit information, thereby providing more detailed and clearer insights for student learning. To further optimize the performance, we introduce an Adaptive Decay Weight (ADW) strategy, which can dynamically adjust the weights for critical category pairs using Inverse Rank Weighting (IRW) and Exponential Rank Decay (ERD). Specifically, IRW assigns weights inversely proportional to the rank differences between pairs, while ERD adaptively controls weight decay based on total ranking scores of category pairs. Furthermore, after the recursive decoupling, we distill the remaining non-target knowledge to ensure knowledge completeness and enhance performance. Ultimately, our method improves the student's performance by transferring fine-grained knowledge and emphasizing the most critical relationships. Extensive experiments on datasets such as CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K, and Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate that our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art logit-based distillation approaches. The code will be made publicly available.