Driven by the goal to enable sleep apnea monitoring and machine learning-based detection at home with small mobile devices, we investigate whether interpretation-based indirect knowledge transfer can be used to create classifiers with acceptable performance. Interpretation-based indirect knowledge transfer means that a classifier (student) learns from a synthetic dataset based on the knowledge representation from an already trained Deep Network (teacher). We use activation maximization to generate visualizations and create a synthetic dataset to train the student classifier. This approach has the advantage that student classifiers can be trained without access to the original training data. With experiments we investigate the feasibility of interpretation-based indirect knowledge transfer and its limitations. The student achieves an accuracy of 97.8 on MNIST (teacher accuracy: 99.3 ) with a similar smaller architecture to that of the teacher. The student classifier achieves an accuracy of 86.1 and 89.5 for a subset of the Apnea-ECG dataset (teacher: 89.5 and 91.1 , respectively).
 The recent advanced face recognition systems were built on large Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) or their ensembles, which have millions of parameters. However, the expensive computation of DNNs make their deployment difficult on mobile and embedded devices. This work addresses model compression for face recognition, where the learned knowledge of a large teacher network or its ensemble is utilized as supervision to train a compact student network. Unlike previous works that represent the knowledge by the soften label probabilities, which are difficult to fit, we represent the knowledge by using the neurons at the higher hidden layer, which preserve as much information as the label probabilities, but are more compact. By leveraging the essential characteristics (domain knowledge) of the learned face representation, a neuron selection method is proposed to choose neurons that are most relevant to face recognition. Using the selected neurons as supervision to mimic the single networks of DeepID2+ and DeepID3, which are the state-of-the-art face recognition systems, a compact student with simple network structure achieves better verification accuracy on LFW than its teachers, respectively. When using an ensemble of DeepID2+ as teacher, a mimicked student is able to outperform it and achieves 51.6× compression ratio and 90× speed-up in inference, making this cumbersome model applicable on portable devices. While depth tends to improve network performances, it also makes gradient-based training more difficult since deeper networks tend to be more non-linear. The recently proposed knowledge distillation approach is aimed at obtaining small and fast-to-execute models, and it has shown that a student network could imitate the soft output of a larger teacher network or ensemble of networks. In this paper, we extend this idea to allow the training of a student that is deeper and thinner than the teacher, using not only the outputs but also the intermediate representations learned by the teacher as hints to improve the training process and final performance of the student. Because the student intermediate hidden layer will generally be smaller than the teacher's intermediate hidden layer, additional parameters are introduced to map the student hidden layer to the prediction of the teacher hidden layer. This allows one to train deeper students that can generalize better or run faster, a trade-off that is controlled by the chosen student capacity. For example, on CIFAR-10, a deep student network with almost 10.4 times less parameters outperforms a larger, state-of-the-art teacher network.