Yes, they do. This paper provides the first empirical demonstration that deep convolutional models really need to be both deep and convolutional, even when trained with methods such as distillation that allow small or shallow models of high accuracy to be trained.
Although previous research showed that shallow feed-forward nets sometimes can learn the complex functions previously learned by deep nets while using the same number of parameters as the deep models they mimic, in this paper we demonstrate that the same methods cannot be used to train accurate models on CIFAR-10 unless the student models contain multiple layers of convolution. Although the student models do not have to be as deep as the teacher model they mimic, the students need multiple convolutional layers to learn functions of comparable accuracy as the deep convolutional teacher.
…Figure 1 summarizes the results in Table 2 for student models of different depth, number of convolutional layers, and number of parameters when trained to mimic the ensemble teacher model. Student models trained on the ensemble logits are able to achieve accuracies previously unseen on CIFAR-10 for models with so few layers. Also, it is clear that there is a huge gap between the convolutional student models at the top of the figure, and the non-convolutional student models at the bottom of the figure: the most accurate student MLP has accuracy less than 75%, while the least accurate convolutional student model with the same number of parameters but only one convolutional layer has accuracy above 87%. And the accuracy of the convolutional student models increases further as more layers of convolution are added. Interestingly, the most accurate student MLPs with no convolutional layers have only 2 or 3 hidden layers; the student MLPs with 4 or 5 hidden layers are not as accurate.
Comparing the student MLP with only one hidden layer (bottom of the graph) to the student CNN with 1 convolutional layer clearly suggests that convolution is critical for this problem even when models are trained via distillation, and that it is very unlikely that a shallow non-convolutional model with 100 million parameters or less could ever achieve accuracy comparable to a convolutional model. It appears that if convolution is critical for teacher models trained on the original 0/1 hard targets, it is likely to be critical for student models trained to mimic these teacher models. Adding depth to the student MLPs without adding convolution does not substantially close this “convolutional gap”.