by Amit Shekhar · 11 June 2026
How does Knowledge Distillation work?
How Knowledge Distillation works. We will also see why we need it, how a small model learns from a big model, and how this lets us run powerful AI on a phone, on an edge device, and at low cost.
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guessWhat characterizes the small model, known as the student, in terms of speed, cost, and independent intelligence?
Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.
What this article covers
- What is Knowledge Distillation?
- Why we need Knowledge Distillation
- Hard labels vs soft labels
- Dark knowledge
- Temperature in the softmax
- The distillation loss
- A step-by-step training walkthrough
- Types of Knowledge Distillation
- Real examples of Knowledge Distillation
The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.