Model Compression Using Optimal Transport

Model compression methods are important to allow for easier deployment of deep learning models in compute, memory and energy-constrained environments such as mobile phones. Knowledge distillation is a class of model compression algorithms where knowledge from a large teacher network is transferred to a smaller student network thereby improving the student’s performance. In this paper, we show how optimal transport-based loss functions can be used for training a student network which encourages learning student network parameters that help bring the distribution of student features closer to that of the teacher features. We present image classification results on CIFAR-100, SVHN and ImageNet and show that the proposed optimal transport loss functions perform comparably to or better than other loss functions.