Knowledge distillation (KD), transferring knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model, has been investigated to design efficient neural architectures. Generally, the objective function of KD is the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss between the softened probability distributions of the teacher model and the student model with the temperature scaling hyperparameter τ. Despite its widespread use, few studies have discussed how such softening influences generalization. Here, we theoretically show that the KL divergence loss focuses on the logit matching when τ increases and the label matching when τ goes to 0 and empirically show that the logit matching is positively correlated to performance improvement in general. From this observation, we consider an intuitive KD loss function, the mean squared error (MSE) between the logit vectors, so that the student model can directly learn the logit of the teacher model. The MSE loss outperforms the KL divergence loss, explained by the penultimate layer representations difference between the two losses. Furthermore, we show that sequential distillation can improve performance and that KD, using the KL divergence loss with small τ particularly, mitigates the label noise. The code to reproduce the experiments is publicly available online at https://github.com/jhoon-oh/kd_data/.

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) become frail when the datasets contain noisy (incorrect) class labels. Robust techniques in the presence of noisy labels can be categorized into two folds: developing noise-robust functions or using noise-cleansing methods by detecting the noisy data. Recently, noise-cleansing methods have been considered as the most competitive noisy-label learning algorithms. Despite their success, their noisy label detectors are often based on heuristics more than a theory, requiring a robust classifier to predict the noisy data with loss values. In this paper, we propose a novel detector for filtering label noise. Unlike most existing methods, we focus on each data's latent representation dynamics and measure the alignment between the latent distribution and each representation using the eigen decomposition of the data gram matrix. Our framework, coined as filtering noisy instances via their eigenvectors (FINE), provides a robust detector with derivative-free simple methods having theoretical guarantees. Under our framework, we propose three applications of the FINE: sample-selection approach, semi-supervised learning approach, and collaboration with noise-robust loss functions. Experimental results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform corresponding baselines for all three applications on various benchmark datasets.

In order to improve the testabilities and power consumption, a new state assignment technique based on m-block partition is introduced in this paper. The length and number of feedback cycles are reduced with minimal switching activity on the state variables. Experiment shows significant improvement in power dissipation and testabilities for benchmark circuits.