When Better Teachers Don't Make Better Students: Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for CLIP Models in VQA

arXiv — cs.CLTuesday, November 25, 2025 at 5:00:00 AM
  • A systematic study on knowledge distillation (KD) for CLIP models in vision-language tasks reveals that stronger teacher models do not always produce better student models, challenging existing assumptions in the field. The research highlights the limitations of current distillation frameworks, which often fail to scale effectively, leading to decreased performance in downstream multimodal tasks.
  • This finding is significant as it questions the efficacy of traditional knowledge distillation methods in enhancing model performance, particularly in complex vision-language applications. It underscores the need for innovative approaches to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of model training in this rapidly evolving area of artificial intelligence.
  • The study aligns with ongoing discussions in the AI community regarding the balance between model complexity and performance. It reflects a broader trend of exploring alternative methodologies, such as open-vocabulary semantic segmentation and class-incremental learning, which aim to address challenges like overfitting and catastrophic forgetting, thereby enhancing the robustness and applicability of vision-language models.
— via World Pulse Now AI Editorial System

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