cs.LGAug 11, 2026

SQuaT: Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation via Student-Aware Quantized Teacher Features

Authors: HyeonJun LeeHyeonsik JoJinwoo ChungJangho Kim

Organizations: Kookmin University

Abstract

Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) enables the deployment of quantized models with minimal accuracy degradation. However, in practical scenarios, training labels are often unavailable due to privacy, copyright, or cost constraints. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common approach to address this challenge, but we observe that prior work combining QAT with KD suffers from a fundamental limitation: during distillation, the range mismatch between the teacher and the quantized student model induces an unattainable residual, resulting in an irreducible lower bound on the distillation loss. Motivated by this observation, we propose SQuaT (Student-Aware Quantized Teacher Features), a label-free QAT framework with KD that theoretically eliminates this lower bound by applying the student's quantization parameters to quantize the teacher's features during distillation. Through comprehensive experiments across diverse settings, we demonstrate that SQuaT consistently outperforms strong baselines, with particularly pronounced gains in extreme low-bit (e.g., 1- and 2-bit) settings. Furthermore, extensive evaluations across various model design choices show that our approach does not rely on specific architectural assumptions, making it broadly applicable across diverse architectures and quantization settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/lcdbsa522/SQuaT.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. A Target-Centric Survey of Quantization-Aware Training

    Aug 30, 2026Jiamin Song, Mengjie Zhao, Zijing Wang +6

  2. Train Where the Quantized Model Goes: On-Policy Distillation for Low-Bit Reasoning

    Sep 22, 2026Yuanteng Chen, Zhilei Liu, Peisong Wang +7