English

Post-Pruning Accuracy Recovery via Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

Machine Learning 2025-11-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Model pruning is a widely adopted technique to reduce the computational complexity and memory footprint of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, global unstructured pruning often leads to significant degradation in accuracy, typically necessitating fine-tuning on the original training dataset to recover performance. In privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare or finance, access to the original training data is often restricted post-deployment due to regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). This paper proposes a Data-Free Knowledge Distillation framework to bridge the gap between model compression and data privacy. We utilize DeepInversion to synthesize privacy-preserving ``dream'' images from the pre-trained teacher model by inverting Batch Normalization (BN) statistics. These synthetic images serve as a transfer set to distill knowledge from the original teacher to the pruned student network. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 across various architectures (ResNet, MobileNet, VGG) demonstrate that our method significantly recovers accuracy lost during pruning without accessing a single real data point.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.20702,
  title  = {Post-Pruning Accuracy Recovery via Data-Free Knowledge Distillation},
  author = {Chinmay Tripurwar and Utkarsh Maurya and Dishant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.20702},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:54:53.412Z