  Although Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown a strong capacity to solve
large-scale problems in many areas, such DNNs are hard to be deployed in
real-world systems due to their voluminous parameters. To tackle this issue,
Teacher-Student architectures were proposed, where simple student networks with
a few parameters can achieve comparable performance to deep teacher networks
with many parameters. Recently, Teacher-Student architectures have been
effectively and widely embraced on various knowledge distillation (KD)
objectives, including knowledge compression, knowledge expansion, knowledge
adaptation, and knowledge enhancement. With the help of Teacher-Student
architectures, current studies are able to achieve multiple distillation
objectives through lightweight and generalized student networks. Different from
existing KD surveys that primarily focus on knowledge compression, this survey
first explores Teacher-Student architectures across multiple distillation
objectives. This survey presents an introduction to various knowledge
representations and their corresponding optimization objectives. Additionally,
we provide a systematic overview of Teacher-Student architectures with
representative learning algorithms and effective distillation schemes. This
survey also summarizes recent applications of Teacher-Student architectures
across multiple purposes, including classification, recognition, generation,
ranking, and regression. Lastly, potential research directions in KD are
investigated, focusing on architecture design, knowledge quality, and
theoretical studies of regression-based learning, respectively. Through this
comprehensive survey, industry practitioners and the academic community can
gain valuable insights and guidelines for effectively designing, learning, and
applying Teacher-Student architectures on various distillation objectives.

Machine Learning;Artificial Intelligence