Interpretability-preserving knowledge distillation via multi-granular feature alignment for resource-efficient CNNs
摘要
The application of deep learning models in resource-constrained environments requires a trade-off among accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability a trilemma frequently neglected in conventional knowledge distillation (KD) approaches. This paper introduces an interpretable knowledge distillation framework that transcends these goals through three innovations: (1) multi-granular semantic alignment for hierarchical feature structure preservation, (2) attention-gated distillation to impose spatial reasoning consistency, and (3) concept activation preservation for human-interpretable decision logic. Measured on CIFAR-10 and CUB-200-2011 benchmark datasets, our method obtains 92% accuracy (99.57% retention) and 86.94% accuracy (89.54% retention), respectively, with 0.576 average saliency similarity to the teacher model. By lowering the complexity of the model by 13.7