# 3D Point Cloud Pre-training with Knowledge Distillation from 2D Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08974 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08974/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 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 44 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 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 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01802/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [CLIP-FO3D: Learning Free Open-world 3D Scene Representations from 2D Dense CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04748/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal and Uncertainty-Aware Agglomeration for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16707/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Uncertainty-aware Bounding Boxes for Unsupervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00619/) (2024)
- [Language-Assisted 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11451/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Guidance for LiDAR-based Unsupervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03790/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14845/) (2024)
- [Smaller3d: Smaller Models for 3D Semantic Segmentation Using Minkowski Engine and Knowledge Distillation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03188/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent success of pre-trained 2D vision models is mostly attributable to learning from large-scale datasets. However, compared with 2D image datasets, the current pre-training data of 3D point cloud is limited. To overcome this limitation, we propose a knowledge distillation method for 3D point cloud pre-trained models to acquire knowledge directly from the 2D representation learning model, particularly the image encoder of CLIP, through concept alignment. Specifically, we introduce a cross-attention mechanism to extract concept features from 3D point cloud and compare them with the semantic information from 2D images. In this scheme, the point cloud pre-trained models learn directly from rich information contained in 2D teacher models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed knowledge distillation scheme achieves higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art 3D pre-training methods for synthetic and real-world datasets on downstream tasks, including object classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and part segmentation.