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arXiv · 2512.09886

HPM-KD: Hierarchical Progressive Multi-Teacher Framework for Knowledge Distillation and Efficient Model Compression

Gustavo Coelho Haase·Paulo Henrique Dourado da Silva
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Abstract

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a promising technique for model compression but faces critical limitations: (1) sensitivity to hyperparameters requiring extensive manual tuning, (2) capacity gap when distilling from very large teachers to small students, (3) suboptimal coordination in multi-teacher scenarios, and (4) inefficient use of computational resources. We present \textbf{HPM-KD}, a framework that integrates six synergistic components: (i) Adaptive Configuration Manager via meta-learning that eliminates manual hyperparameter tuning, (ii) Progressive Distillation Chain with automatically determined intermediate models, (iii) Attention-Weighted Multi-Teacher Ensemble that learns dynamic per-sample weights, (iv) Meta-Learned Temperature Scheduler that adapts temperature throughout training, (v) Parallel Processing Pipeline with intelligent load balancing, and (vi) Shared Optimization Memory for cross-experiment reuse. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and tabular datasets demonstrate that HPM-KD: achieves 10x-15x compression while maintaining 85% accuracy retention, eliminates the need for manual tuning, and reduces training time by 30-40% via parallelization. Ablation studies confirm independent contribution of each component (0.10-0.98 pp). HPM-KD is available as part of the open-source DeepBridge library.

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Gustavo Coelho Haase, Paulo Henrique Dourado da Silva. 2025-12-10. HPM-KD: Hierarchical Progressive Multi-Teacher Framework for Knowledge Distillation and Efficient Model Compression. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09886

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