# PointDistiller: Structured Knowledge Distillation Towards Efficient and Compact 3D Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 65 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2022.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Learning Sparse Neural Networks through L0 Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01312/) (2017)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [PACT: Parameterized Clipping Activation for Quantized Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06085/) (2018)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [ShapeLLM: Universal 3D Object Understanding for Embodied Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17766/) (2024)
- [DreamBench++: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16855/) (2024)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [How Simulation Helps Autonomous Driving:A Survey of Sim2real, Digital Twins, and Parallel Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01263/) (2023)
- [X3KD: Knowledge Distillation Across Modalities, Tasks and Stages for Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02203/) (2023)
- [RadarDistill: Boosting Radar-based Object Detection Performance via Knowledge Distillation from LiDAR Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05061/) (2024)
- [CRKD: Enhanced Camera-Radar Object Detection with Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19104/) (2024)
- [Federated Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08564/) (2024)
- [Positional Prompt Tuning for Efficient 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11567/) (2024)
- [LabelDistill: Label-guided Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation for Camera-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10164/) (2024)
- [SRKD: Towards Efficient 3D Point Cloud Segmentation via Structure- and Relation-aware Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17290/) (2025)
- [Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03105/) (2023)
- [Transformer-Based Autonomous Driving Models and Deployment-Oriented Compression: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10891/) (2023)
- [CKD: Contrastive Knowledge Distillation from A Sample-wise Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14109/) (2024)
- [Label-Guided Auxiliary Training Improves 3D Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11753/) (2022)
- [Ada3D : Exploiting the Spatial Redundancy with Adaptive Inference for Efficient 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08209/) (2023)
- [S3PT: Scene Semantics and Structure Guided Clustering to Boost Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23085/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Indoor Occupancy Prediction via Sparse Query-Based Multi-Level Consistent Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02318/) (2026)
- [Structured Knowledge Distillation Towards Efficient and Compact Multi-View 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08398/) (2022)
- [Representation Disparity-aware Distillation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10308/) (2023)
- [T3DNet: Compressing Point Cloud Models for Lightweight 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19264/) (2024)
- [LEROjD: Lidar Extended Radar-Only Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05564/) (2024)
- [Reflectance Prediction-based Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection in Compressed Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17442/) (2025)
- [MapKD: Unlocking Prior Knowledge with Cross-Modal Distillation for Efficient Online HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15653/) (2025)
- [MonoSKD: General Distillation Framework for Monocular 3D Object Detection via Spearman Correlation Coefficient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11316/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14845/) (2024)
- [Feature Adversarial Distillation for Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14221/) (2023)
- [IntrinsicReal: Adapting IntrinsicAnything from Synthetic to Real Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00777/) (2025)
- [StripDet: Strip Attention-Based Lightweight 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05954/) (2025)
- [IMKD: Intensity-Aware Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Camera-Radar Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15581/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The remarkable breakthroughs in point cloud representation learning have boosted their usage in real-world applications such as self-driving cars and virtual reality. However, these applications usually have an urgent requirement for not only accurate but also efficient 3D object detection. Recently, knowledge distillation has been proposed as an effective model compression technique, which transfers the knowledge from an over-parameterized teacher to a lightweight student and achieves consistent effectiveness in 2D vision. However, due to point clouds' sparsity and irregularity, directly applying previous image-based knowledge distillation methods to point cloud detectors usually leads to unsatisfactory performance. To fill the gap, this paper proposes PointDistiller, a structured knowledge distillation framework for point clouds-based 3D detection. Concretely, PointDistiller includes local distillation which extracts and distills the local geometric structure of point clouds with dynamic graph convolution and reweighted learning strategy, which highlights student learning on the crucial points or voxels to improve knowledge distillation efficiency. Extensive experiments on both voxels-based and raw points-based detectors have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over seven previous knowledge distillation methods. For instance, our 4X compressed PointPillars student achieves 2.8 and 3.4 mAP improvements on BEV and 3D object detection, outperforming its teacher by 0.9 and 1.8 mAP, respectively. Codes have been released at https://github.com/RunpeiDong/PointDistiller.