Although deep neural networks show their extraordinary power in various tasks, they are not feasible for deploying such large models on embedded systems due to high computational cost and storage space limitation. The recent work knowledge distillation (KD) aims at transferring model knowledge from a well-trained teacher model to a small and fast student model which can significantly help extending the usage of large deep neural networks on portable platform. In this paper, we show that, by properly defining the neuron manifold of deep neuron network (DNN), we can significantly improve the performance of student DNN networks through approximating neuron manifold of powerful teacher network. To make this, we propose several novel methods for learning neuron manifold from DNN model. Empowered with neuron manifold knowledge, our experiments show the great improvement across a variety of DNN architectures and training data. Compared with other KD methods, our Neuron Manifold Transfer (NMT) has best transfer ability of the learned features.
A new knowledge distill method for transfer learning The work introduces a knowledge distillation method using the proposed neuron manifold concept.  Proposes a knowledge distilling method in which neural manifold is taken as the transferred knowledge.