Performance-Aware Mutual Knowledge Distillation for Improving Neural Architecture Search

Knowledge distillation has shown great effectiveness for improving neural architecture search (NAS). Mutual knowledge distillation (MKD), where a group of models mutually generate knowledge to train each other, has achieved promising results in many applications. In existing MKD methods, mutual knowledge distillation is performed between models without scrutiny: a worse-performing model is allowed to generate knowledge to train a better-performing model, which may lead to collective failures. To address this problem, we propose a performance-aware MKD (PAMKD) approach for NAS, where knowledge generated by model <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$A$</tex> is allowed to train model <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$B$</tex> only if the performance of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$A$</tex> is better than B. We propose a three-level optimization framework to formulate PAMKD, where three learning stages are performed end-to-end: 1) each model trains an initial model independently; 2) the initial models are evaluated on a validation set and better-performing models generate knowledge to train worse-performing models; 3) architectures are updated by minimizing a validation loss. Experimental results on a variety of datasets demonstrate that our method is effective.