# Masked Distillation with Receptive Tokens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14589 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14589/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [Structured Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04197/) (2019)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10536/) (2022)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Fine-grained Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03609/) (2019)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Focal and Global Knowledge Distillation for Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11837/) (2021)
- [Cross-Image Relational Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06986/) (2022)
- [General Instance Distillation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02340/) (2021)
- [Distilling Object Detectors via Decoupled Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14475/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Adaptation for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04688/) (2019)
- [GreedyNAS: Towards Fast One-Shot NAS with Greedy Supernet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11236/) (2020)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Feature Richness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00674/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Knowledge Diffusion for Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15712/) (2023)
- [DAMO-YOLO : A Report on Real-Time Object Detection Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15444/) (2022)
- [FreeKD: Knowledge Distillation via Semantic Frequency Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12079/) (2023)
- [MoVE-KD: Knowledge Distillation for VLMs with Mixture of Visual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01709/) (2025)
- [ACAM-KD: Adaptive and Cooperative Attention Masking for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06307/) (2025)
- [CM-MaskSD: Cross-Modality Masked Self-Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11481/) (2023)
- [Jaccard Metric Losses: Optimizing the Jaccard Index with Soft Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05666/) (2023)
- [Cloud-Device Collaborative Learning for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16279/) (2023)
- [Are Large Kernels Better Teachers than Transformers for ConvNets?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19412/) (2023)
- [Augmentation-Free Dense Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04168/) (2023)
- [LIX: Implicitly Infusing Spatial Geometric Prior Knowledge into Visual Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08215/) (2024)
- [Avatar Knowledge Distillation: Self-ensemble Teacher Paradigm with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02722/) (2023)
- [Dice Semimetric Losses: Optimizing the Dice Score with Soft Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16296/) (2023)
- [Make a Strong Teacher with Label Assistance: A Novel Knowledge Distillation Approach for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13254/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Models Pre-Training: Rethinking Training Acceleration of Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12391/) (2026)
- [Distilling Temporal Knowledge with Masked Feature Reconstruction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01918/) (2024)
- [Exploring Graph-based Knowledge: Multi-Level Feature Distillation via Channels Relational Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08547/) (2024)
- [Color as the Impetus: Transforming Few-Shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22136/) (2025)
- [Improving Diagnostic Performance on Small and Imbalanced Datasets Using Class-Based Input Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03891/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Knowledge Distillation from Vision Foundation Models for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02554/) (2026)
- [Learnable Instance Attention Filtering for Adaptive Detector Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26088/) (2026)
- [SWARD: Stochastic Window-Attention-Based Relational Distillation for Cross-Architectural Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00999/) (2026)
- [Enhanced Knowledge Distillation for Detection Transformer via Teacher Prediction Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19964/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distilling from the feature maps can be fairly effective for dense prediction tasks since both the feature discriminability and localization priors can be well transferred. However, not every pixel contributes equally to the performance, and a good student should learn from what really matters to the teacher. In this paper, we introduce a learnable embedding dubbed receptive token to localize those pixels of interests (PoIs) in the feature map, with a distillation mask generated via pixel-wise attention. Then the distillation will be performed on the mask via pixel-wise reconstruction. In this way, a distillation mask actually indicates a pattern of pixel dependencies within feature maps of teacher. We thus adopt multiple receptive tokens to investigate more sophisticated and informative pixel dependencies to further enhance the distillation. To obtain a group of masks, the receptive tokens are learned via the regular task loss but with teacher fixed, and we also leverage a Dice loss to enrich the diversity of learned masks. Our method dubbed MasKD is simple and practical, and needs no priors of tasks in application. Experiments show that our MasKD can achieve state-of-the-art performance consistently on object detection and semantic segmentation benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/hunto/MasKD .