# itKD: Interchange Transfer-based Knowledge Distillation for 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 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 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 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 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (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)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (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)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01186/) (2015)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [Point-GNN: Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection in a Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01251/) (2020)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Fine-grained Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03609/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Head: Unifying Object Detection Heads with Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08322/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [ImVoxelNet: Image to Voxels Projection for Monocular and Multi-View General-Purpose 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01178/) (2021)
- [Pillar-based Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10323/) (2020)
- [Not All Points Are Equal: Learning Highly Efficient Point-based Detectors for 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11139/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Not All Voxels Are Equal: Hardness-Aware Semantic Scene Completion with Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11958/) (2024)
- [MapDistill: Boosting Efficient Camera-based HD Map Construction via Camera-LiDAR Fusion Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11682/) (2024)
- [Deep Transfer Learning for Intelligent Vehicle Perception: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15110/) (2023)
- [LabelDistill: Label-guided Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation for Camera-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10164/) (2024)
- [Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03105/) (2023)
- [CAML: Collaborative Auxiliary Modality Learning for Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17821/) (2025)
- [Weak-to-Strong 3D Object Detection with X-Ray Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00679/) (2024)
- [Structured Knowledge Distillation Towards Efficient and Compact Multi-View 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08398/) (2022)
- [Reflectance Prediction-based Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection in Compressed Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17442/) (2025)
- [MMCD: Multi-Modal Collaborative Decision-Making for Connected Autonomy with Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18198/) (2025)
- [ORC: Network Group-based Knowledge Distillation using Online Role Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01186/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Anchor-based LiDAR 3D Object Detection via Point Assisted Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01978/) (2024)
- [Semantic-Supervised Spatial-Temporal Fusion for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10579/) (2025)
- [Lightweight 3D Object Detection via Mamba-Based Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03490/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point-cloud based 3D object detectors recently have achieved remarkable progress. However, most studies are limited to the development of network architectures for improving only their accuracy without consideration of the computational efficiency. In this paper, we first propose an autoencoder-style framework comprising channel-wise compression and decompression via interchange transfer-based knowledge distillation. To learn the map-view feature of a teacher network, the features from teacher and student networks are independently passed through the shared autoencoder; here, we use a compressed representation loss that binds the channel-wised compression knowledge from both student and teacher networks as a kind of regularization. The decompressed features are transferred in opposite directions to reduce the gap in the interchange reconstructions. Lastly, we present an head attention loss to match the 3D object detection information drawn by the multi-head self-attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we verify that our method can train the lightweight model that is well-aligned with the 3D point cloud detection task and we demonstrate its superiority using the well-known public datasets; e.g., Waymo and nuScenes.