Knowledge distillation across teacher architectures for compact diabetic retinopathy grading

arXiv:2610.35961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy grading from retinal fundus photographs is important but difficult to deploy on resource-constrained hardware. We conducted a controlled study of offline response-based knowledge distillation for five-class diabetic retinopathy grading on APTOS 2019, comparing ResNet-50, MobileNetV3-Large, and Swin Transformer-Tiny (Swin-T) teachers distilled into a MobileNetV3-Small student. A 3 x 4 x 2 grid of teacher, temperature, and hard-label weight was screened at one seed, while six configurations and the no-distillation baseline were evaluated across three seeds.