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Does Knowledge Distillation Really Work? Samuel Stanton NYU Pavel Izmailov NYU Polina Kirichenko NYU Alexander A. Alemi Google Research Andrew Gordon Wilson NYU

Neural Information Processing Systems

Knowledge distillation is a popular technique for training a small student network to emulate a larger teacher model, such as an ensemble of networks. We show that while knowledge distillation can improve student generalization, it does not typically work as it is commonly understood: there often remains a surprisingly large discrepancy between the predictive distributions of the teacher and the student, even in cases when the student has the capacity to perfectly match the teacher. We identify difficulties in optimization as a key reason for why the student is unable to match the teacher. We also show how the details of the dataset used for distillation play a role in how closely the student matches the teacher -- and that more closely matching the teacher paradoxically does not always lead to better student generalization.




Supplementary Materials: An Empirical Study of Adder Neural Networks for Object Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

As discussed in prior literature [1, 4], one operation of floating-point addition and multiplication have energy costs of 0.9 pJ and 3.7 pJ, respectively. Meanwhile, one operation of 8-bit integer addition and multiplication have 0.03 pJ and 0.2 pJ energy costs, demonstrating much lower cost than floating-point operation. Therefore, it is important to explore whether adder detectors performs well for INT8 quantization. We tried to adopt INT8 post quantization for our Adder FCOS (B+N) model, which suffers 0.8 mAP drop compared with full precision model, as shown in Table A. The energy reduction further increases from 29% to 35%. Note that post training quantization is not optimal for INT8 models, and quantization-aware training may greatly further improve the accuracy.




Trustworthy Multimodal Regression with Mixture of Normal-inverse Gamma Distributions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal regression is a fundamental task, which integrates the information from different sources to improve the performance of follow-up applications. However, existing methods mainly focus on improving the performance and often ignore the confidence of prediction for diverse situations. In this study, we are devoted to trustworthy multimodal regression which is critical in cost-sensitive domains. To this end, we introduce a novel Mixture of Normal-Inverse Gamma distributions (MoNIG) algorithm, which efficiently estimates uncertainty in principle for adaptive integration of different modalities and produces a trustworthy regression result. Our model can be dynamically aware of uncertainty for each modality, and also robust for corrupted modalities. Furthermore, the proposed MoNIG ensures explicitly representation of (modality-specific/global) epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, respectively. Experimental results on both synthetic and different real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and trustworthiness of our method on various multimodal regression tasks (e.g., temperature prediction for superconductivity, relative location prediction for CT slices, and multimodal sentiment analysis3).



Best Apps for Focus (2026): Focus Friend, Forest, Focus Traveller

WIRED

Here are our recommendations for apps that help you stay focused on the task at hand. And with attention spans crumbling in the TikTok era, we now have an entire category of apps dedicated to helping you stick to what you're supposed to be doing. These apps all work more or less in the same way, giving you a straightforward method of tracking how long you're spending on a task, and offering some sort of incentive to keep going for the allotted amount of time. Sometimes you get a few extra features as well, like the ability to block access to other apps. In the interest of trying to write this specific article without switching between browser tabs and apps every two minutes, I gave three of the best focus tools a try.