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SDAKD: Student Discriminator Assisted Knowledge Distillation for Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-10-07 v1

Abstract

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) achieve excellent performance in generative tasks, such as image super-resolution, but their computational requirements make difficult their deployment on resource-constrained devices. While knowledge distillation is a promising research direction for GAN compression, effectively training a smaller student generator is challenging due to the capacity mismatch between the student generator and the teacher discriminator. In this work, we propose Student Discriminator Assisted Knowledge Distillation (SDAKD), a novel GAN distillation methodology that introduces a student discriminator to mitigate this capacity mismatch. SDAKD follows a three-stage training strategy, and integrates an adapted feature map distillation approach in its last two training stages. We evaluated SDAKD on two well-performing super-resolution GANs, GCFSR and Real-ESRGAN. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baselines and SOTA GAN knowledge distillation methods. The SDAKD source code will be made openly available upon acceptance of the paper.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.03870,
  title  = {SDAKD: Student Discriminator Assisted Knowledge Distillation for Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks},
  author = {Nikolaos Kaparinos and Vasileios Mezaris},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.03870},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Under review

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:17:15.798Z