# StereoDistill: Pick the Cream from LiDAR for Distilling Stereo-based 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01615/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [M3D-RPN: Monocular 3D Region Proposal Network for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06038/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03233/) (2018)
- [Disentangling Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12365/) (2019)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR++: Accurate Depth for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06310/) (2019)
- [DeepStereo: Learning to Predict New Views from the World's Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06825/) (2015)
- [EPNet: Enhancing Point Features with Image Semantics for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08856/) (2020)
- [Stereo R-CNN based 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09738/) (2019)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [RTM3D: Real-time Monocular 3D Detection from Object Keypoints for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03343/) (2020)

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

- [CRKD: Enhanced Camera-Radar Object Detection with Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19104/) (2024)
- [DDS3D: Dense Pseudo-Labels with Dynamic Threshold for Semi-Supervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05079/) (2023)
- [S3PT: Scene Semantics and Structure Guided Clustering to Boost Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23085/) (2024)
- [StereoDETR: Stereo-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18788/) (2025)
- [Real-time Stereo-based 3D Object Detection for Streaming Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12394/) (2024)
- [DDStereo: Efficient Dual Decoder Transformers for Stereo 3D Road Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24805/) (2026)
- [IMKD: Intensity-Aware Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Camera-Radar Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15581/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a cross-modal distillation method named StereoDistill to narrow the gap between the stereo and LiDAR-based approaches via distilling the stereo detectors from the superior LiDAR model at the response level, which is usually overlooked in 3D object detection distillation. The key designs of StereoDistill are: the X-component Guided Distillation~(XGD) for regression and the Cross-anchor Logit Distillation~(CLD) for classification. In XGD, instead of empirically adopting a threshold to select the high-quality teacher predictions as soft targets, we decompose the predicted 3D box into sub-components and retain the corresponding part for distillation if the teacher component pilot is consistent with ground truth to largely boost the number of positive predictions and alleviate the mimicking difficulty of the student model. For CLD, we aggregate the probability distribution of all anchors at the same position to encourage the highest probability anchor rather than individually distill the distribution at the anchor level. Finally, our StereoDistill achieves state-of-the-art results for stereo-based 3D detection on the KITTI test benchmark and extensive experiments on KITTI and Argoverse Dataset validate the effectiveness.