The standard post-training recipe for large reasoning models, supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning (SFT-then-RL), may limit the benefits of the RL stage: while SFT imitates expert demonstrations, it often causes overconfidence and reduces generation diversity, leaving RL with a narrowed solution space to explore. Adding entropy regularization during SFT is not a cure-all; it tends to flatten token distributions toward uniformity, increasing entropy without improving meaningful exploration capability. In this paper, we propose CurioSFT, an entropy-preserving SFT method designed to enhance exploration capabilities through intrinsic curiosity. It consists of (a) Self-Exploratory Distillation, which distills the model toward a self-generated, temperature-scaled teacher to encourage exploration within its capability; and (b) Entropy-Guided Temperature Selection, which adaptively adjusts distillation strength to mitigate knowledge forgetting by amplifying exploration at reasoning tokens while stabilizing factual tokens. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that, in SFT stage, CurioSFT outperforms the vanilla SFT by 2.5 points on in-distribution tasks and 2.9 points on out-of-distribution tasks. We also verify that exploration capabilities preserved during SFT successfully translate into concrete gains in RL stage, yielding an average improvement of 5.0 points.
TrajSyn: Privacy-Preserving Dataset Distillation from Federated Model Trajectories for Server-Side Adversarial Training
Computer Science Department, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学计算机科学系）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology（维洛雷理工学院计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Information Technology, Deakin University（德肯大学信息科技学院）
Traditional approaches to RL have focused on learning decision policies directly from episodic decisions, while slowly and implicitly learning the semantics of compositional representations needed for generalization. While some approaches have been adopted to refine representations via auxiliary self-supervised losses while simultaneously learning decision policies, learning compositional representations from hand-designed and context-independent self-supervised losses (multi-view) still adapts relatively slowly to the real world, which contains many non-IID subspaces requiring rapid distribut…
Large-scale speech self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged to the main field of speech processing, however, the problem of computational cost arising from its vast size makes a high entry barrier to academia. In addition, existing distillation techniques of speech SSL models compress the model by reducing layers, which induces performance degradation in linguistic pattern recognition tasks such as phoneme recognition (PR). In this paper, we propose FitHuBERT, which makes thinner in dimension throughout almost all model components and deeper in layer compared to prior speech SSL distillation…
It is a consensus that small models perform quite poorly under the paradigm of self-supervised contrastive learning. Existing methods usually adopt a large off-the-shelf model to transfer knowledge to the small one via distillation. Despite their effectiveness, distillation-based methods may not be suitable for some resource-restricted scenarios due to the huge computational expenses of deploying a large model. In this paper, we study the issue of training self-supervised small models without distillation signals. We first evaluate the representation spaces of the small models and make two non…
Knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely used for model compression and knowledge transfer. Typically, a big teacher model trained on sufficient data transfers knowledge to a small student model. However, despite the success of KD, little effort has been made to study whether KD leaks the training data of the teacher model. In this paper, we experimentally reveal that KD suffers from the risk of privacy leakage. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method, swing distillation, which can effectively protect the private information of the teacher model from flowin…
The global outbreak of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has overloaded worldwide healthcare systems. Computer-aided diagnosis for COVID-19 fast detection and patient triage is becoming critical. This paper proposes a novel self-knowledge distillation based self-supervised learning method for COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray images. Our method can use self-knowledge of images based on similarities of their visual features for self-supervised learning. Experimental results show that our method achieved an HM score of 0.988, an AUC of 0.999, and an accuracy of 0.957 on the largest open COVID-19…
Ensemble Distribution Distillation for Self-Supervised Human Activity Recognition
organization= The University of New South Wales , city= Sydney , country= Australia；organization= The University of New South Wales \& CSIRO , city= Sydney , country= Australia
Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Graph convolutional networks have made great progress in graph-based semi-supervised learning. Existing methods mainly assume that nodes connected by graph edges are prone to have similar attributes and labels, so that the features smoothed by local graph structures can reveal the class similarities. However, there often exist mismatches between graph structures and labels in many real-world scenarios, where the structures may propagate misleading features or labels that eventually affect the model performance. In this paper, we propose a multi-task self-distillation framework that injects sel…
In this paper, we propose a novel training procedure for the continual representation learning problem in which a neural network model is sequentially learned to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in visual search tasks. Our method, called Contrastive Supervised Distillation (CSD), reduces feature forgetting while learning discriminative features. This is achieved by leveraging labels information in a distillation setting in which the student model is contrastively learned from the teacher model. Extensive experiments show that CSD performs favorably in mitigating catastrophic forgetting by out…
Advanced Research Lab NavInfo Europe（四维图新欧洲高级研究实验室）
Self-supervised learning solves pretext prediction tasks that do not require annotations to learn feature representations. For vision tasks, pretext tasks such as predicting rotation, solving jigsaw are solely created from the input data. Yet, predicting this known information helps in learning representations useful for downstream tasks. However, recent works have shown that wider and deeper models benefit more from self-supervised learning than smaller models. To address the issue of self-supervised pre-training of smaller models, we propose Distill-on-the-Go (DoGo), a self-supervised learni…
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；United Imaging Intelligence（联影智能）
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where local nodes collaboratively train a central model while the training data remains decentralized. Existing FL methods typically share model parameters or employ co-distillation to address the issue of unbalanced data distribution. However, they suffer from communication bottlenecks. More importantly, they risk privacy leakage. In this work, we develop a privacy preserving and communication efficient method in a FL framework with one-shot offline knowledge distillation using unlabeled, cross-domain public data. We propose a quantized a…
Dynamic Sub-graph Distillation for Robust Semi-supervised Continual Learning
Tianjin University（天津大学）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Haihe Laboratory of Information Technology Application Innovation（海河信息技术应用创新实验室）
Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) has emerged as an effective tool to train object detectors using only the image-level category labels. However, without object-level labels, WSOD detectors are prone to detect bounding boxes on salient objects, clustered objects and discriminative object parts. Moreover, the image-level category labels do not enforce consistent object detection across different transformations of the same images. To address the above issues, we propose a Comprehensive Attention Self-Distillation (CASD) training approach for WSOD. To balance feature learning among all o…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Sea AI Lab（Sea人工智能实验室）；Mila-Québec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；HEC Montréal（蒙特利尔高等商学院）
Recently, there has been increasing interest in the challenge of how to discriminatively vectorize graphs. To address this, we propose a method called Iterative Graph Self-Distillation (IGSD) which learns graph-level representation in an unsupervised manner through instance discrimination using a self-supervised contrastive learning approach. IGSD involves a teacher-student distillation process that uses graph diffusion augmentations and constructs the teacher model using an exponential moving average of the student model. The intuition behind IGSD is to predict the teacher network representat…
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences（柯朗数学科学研究所）；New York University（纽约大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Center of Data Science（数据科学中心）
Self-supervised learning on graphs has recently achieved remarkable success in graph representation learning. With hundreds of self-supervised pretext tasks proposed over the past few years, the research community has greatly developed, and the key is no longer to design more powerful but complex pretext tasks, but to make more effective use of those already on hand. This paper studies the problem of how to automatically, adaptively, and dynamically learn instance-level self-supervised learning strategies for each node from a given pool of pretext tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Intelligent fault diagnosis has made extraordinary advancements currently. Nonetheless, few works tackle class-incremental learning for fault diagnosis under limited fault data, i.e., imbalanced and long-tailed fault diagnosis, which brings about various notable challenges. Initially, it is difficult to extract discriminative features from limited fault data. Moreover, a well-trained model must be retrained from scratch to classify the samples from new classes, thus causing a high computational burden and time consumption. Furthermore, the model may suffer from catastrophic forgetting when tra…
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；United Imaging Intelligence（联影智能）
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where many local nodes collaboratively train a central model while keeping the training data decentralized. This is particularly relevant for clinical applications since patient data are usually not allowed to be transferred out of medical facilities, leading to the need for FL. Existing FL methods typically share model parameters or employ co-distillation to address the issue of unbalanced data distribution. However, they also require numerous rounds of synchronized communication and, more importantly, suffer from a privacy leakage risk. …
We propose a new semi-supervised learning method on face-related tasks based on Multi-Task Learning (MTL) and data distillation. The proposed method exploits multiple datasets with different labels for different-but-related tasks such as simultaneous age, gender, race, facial expression estimation. Specifically, when there are only a few well-labeled data for a specific task among the multiple related ones, we exploit the labels of other related tasks in different domains. Our approach is composed of (1) a new MTL method which can deal with weakly labeled datasets and perform several tasks sim…
To solve deep neural network (DNN)'s huge training dataset and its high computation issue, so-called teacher-student (T-S) DNN which transfers the knowledge of T-DNN to S-DNN has been proposed. However, the existing T-S-DNN has limited range of use, and the knowledge of T-DNN is insufficiently transferred to S-DNN. To improve the quality of the transferred knowledge from T-DNN, we propose a new knowledge distillation using singular value decomposition (SVD). In addition, we define a knowledge transfer as a self-supervised task and suggest a way to continuously receive information from T-DNN. S…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Knowledge distillation is a learning paradigm for boosting resource-efficient graph neural networks (GNNs) using more expressive yet cumbersome teacher models. Past work on distillation for GNNs proposed the Local Structure Preserving loss (LSP), which matches local structural relationships defined over edges across the student and teacher's node embeddings. This paper studies whether preserving the global topology of how the teacher embeds graph data can be a more effective distillation objective for GNNs, as real-world graphs often contain latent interactions and noisy edges. We propose Grap…
University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Vector Institute for AI（人工智能向量研究所）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）
Recent advancements in self-supervised learning have reduced the gap between supervised and unsupervised representation learning. However, most self-supervised and deep clustering techniques rely heavily on data augmentation, rendering them ineffective for many learning tasks where insufficient domain knowledge exists for performing augmentation. We propose a new self-distillation based algorithm for domain-agnostic clustering. Our method builds upon the existing deep clustering frameworks and requires no separate student model. The proposed method outperforms existing domain agnostic (augment…
Recent breakthroughs in the field of semi-supervised learning have achieved results that match state-of-the-art traditional supervised learning methods. Most successful semi-supervised learning approaches in computer vision focus on leveraging huge amount of unlabeled data, learning the general representation via data augmentation and transformation, creating pseudo labels, implementing different loss functions, and eventually transferring this knowledge to more task-specific smaller models. In this paper, we aim to conduct our analyses on three different aspects of SimCLR, the current state-o…
Class Incremental Fault Diagnosis under Limited Fault Data via Supervised Contrastive Knowledge Distillation
ZJU-UIUC Joint Institute at Zhejiang University（浙江大学-伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校联合研究所）；ZJU-UoE Institute at Zhejiang University（浙江大学-爱丁堡大学联合研究所）；College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science at Zhejiang University（浙江大学生物医学工程与仪器科学学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology in Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Weakly supervised instance labeling using only image-level labels, in lieu of expensive fine-grained pixel annotations, is crucial in several applications including medical image analysis. In contrast to conventional instance segmentation scenarios in computer vision, the problems that we consider are characterized by a small number of training images and non-local patterns that lead to the diagnosis. In this paper, we explore the use of multiple instance learning (MIL) to design an instance label generator under this weakly supervised setting. Motivated by the observation that an MIL model ca…
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
The increased amount of multi-modal medical data has opened the opportunities to simultaneously process various modalities such as imaging and non-imaging data to gain a comprehensive insight into the disease prediction domain. Recent studies using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) provide novel semi-supervised approaches for integrating heterogeneous modalities while investigating the patients' associations for disease prediction. However, when the meta-data used for graph construction is not available at inference time (e.g., coming from a distinct population), the conventional methods exh…
Approaching Low-Cost Cardiac Intelligence with Semi-Supervised Knowledge Distillation
Department of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程系）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Hong Kong Center for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering（香港脑心血管健康工程中心）；Hong Kong Institutes of Medical Engineering（香港医学工程研究所）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；McMaster University（麦 master 大学）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
Ensembles of models have been empirically shown to improve predictive performance and to yield robust measures of uncertainty. However, they are expensive in computation and memory. Therefore, recent research has focused on distilling ensembles into a single compact model, reducing the computational and memory burden of the ensemble while trying to preserve its predictive behavior. Most existing distillation formulations summarize the ensemble by capturing its average predictions. As a result, the diversity of the ensemble predictions, stemming from each member, is lost. Thus, the distilled mo…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Weakly supervised phrase grounding aims at learning region-phrase correspondences using only image-sentence pairs. A major challenge thus lies in the missing links between image regions and sentence phrases during training. To address this challenge, we leverage a generic object detector at training time, and propose a contrastive learning framework that accounts for both region-phrase and image-sentence matching. Our core innovation is the learning of a region-phrase score function, based on which an image-sentence score function is further constructed. Importantly, our region-phrase score fu…
Contrastive learning has shown great promise over annotation scarcity problems in the context of medical image segmentation. Existing approaches typically assume a balanced class distribution for both labeled and unlabeled medical images. However, medical image data in reality is commonly imbalanced (i.e., multi-class label imbalance), which naturally yields blurry contours and usually incorrectly labels rare objects. Moreover, it remains unclear whether all negative samples are equally negative. In this work, we present ACTION, an Anatomical-aware ConTrastive dIstillatiON framework, for semi-…
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究科）
This study develops a federated learning (FL) framework overcoming largely incremental communication costs due to model sizes in typical frameworks without compromising model performance. To this end, based on the idea of leveraging an unlabeled open dataset, we propose a distillation-based semi-supervised FL (DS-FL) algorithm that exchanges the outputs of local models among mobile devices, instead of model parameter exchange employed by the typical frameworks. In DS-FL, the communication cost depends only on the output dimensions of the models and does not scale up according to the model size…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Heidelberg（海德堡大学）
Recent advances have indicated the strengths of self-supervised pre-training for improving representation learning on downstream tasks. Existing works often utilize self-supervised pre-trained models by fine-tuning on downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning does not generalize to the case when one needs to build a customized model architecture different from the self-supervised model. In this work, we formulate a new knowledge distillation framework to transfer the knowledge from self-supervised pre-trained models to any other student network by a novel approach named Embedding Graph Alignment.…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Cerebriu A/S（Cerebriu公司）；Biomediq A/S（Biomediq公司）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
In the absence of sufficient data variation (e.g., scanner and protocol variability) in annotated data, deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to overfit during training. As a result, their performance is significantly lower on data from unseen sources compared to the performance on data from the same source as the training data. Semi-supervised domain adaptation methods can alleviate this problem by tuning networks to new target domains without the need for annotated data from these domains. Adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) methods are a popular choice that aim to train networks in such a way th…
