Ensemble Learning of Lightweight Deep Learning Models Using Knowledge Distillation for Image Classification

In recent years, deep learning models have been used successfully in almost every field including both industry and academia, especially for computer vision tasks. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and billions) of parameters, and thus cannot be deployed on the systems and devices with limited resources (e.g., embedded systems and mobile phones). To tackle this, several techniques on model compression and acceleration have been proposed. As a representative type of them, knowledge distillation suggests a way to effectively learn a small student model from large teacher model(s). It has attracted increasing attention since it showed its promising performance. In the work, we propose an ensemble model that combines feature-based, response-based, and relation-based lightweight knowledge distillation models for simple image classification tasks. In our knowledge distillation framework, we use ResNet−20 as a student network and ResNet−110 as a teacher network. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed ensemble model outperforms other knowledge distillation models as well as the large teacher model for image classification tasks, with less computational power than the teacher model.