Efficient model deployment is a key focus in deep learning. This has led to the exploration of methods such as knowledge distillation and network pruning to compress models and increase their performance. In this study, we investigate the potential synergy between knowledge distillation and network pruning to achieve optimal model efficiency and improved generalization. We introduce an innovative framework for model compression that combines knowledge distillation, pruning, and fine-tuning to achieve enhanced compression while providing control over the degree of compactness. Our research is conducted on popular datasets, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, employing diverse model architectures, including ResNet, DenseNet, and EfficientNet. We could calibrate the amount of compression achieved. This allows us to produce models with different degrees of compression while still being just as accurate, or even better. Notably, we demonstrate its efficacy by producing two compressed variants of ResNet 101: ResNet 50 and ResNet 18. Our results reveal intriguing findings. In most cases, the pruned and distilled student models exhibit comparable or superior accuracy to the distilled student models while utilizing significantly fewer parameters.

In recent years, model compression techniques have gained significant attention as a means to reduce the computational and memory requirements of deep neural networks. Knowledge distillation and pruning are two prominent approaches in this domain, each offering unique advantages in achieving model efficiency. This paper investigates the combined effects of knowledge distillation and two pruning strategies, weight pruning and channel pruning, on enhancing compression efficiency and model performance. The study introduces a metric called “Performance Efficiency” to evaluate the impact of these pruning strategies on model compression and performance. Our research is conducted on the popular datasets CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. We compared diverse model architectures, including ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet, and MobileNet. The results emphasize the efficacy of both weight and channel pruning in achieving model compression. However, a significant distinction emerges, with weight pruning showing superior performance across all four architecture types. We realized that the weight pruning method better adapts to knowledge distillation than channel pruning. Pruned models show a significant reduction in parameters without a significant reduction in accuracy.