# ADCNet: Learning from Raw Radar Data via Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [CenterFusion: Center-based Radar and Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04841/) (2020)
- [The Oxford Radar RobotCar Dataset: A Radar Extension to the Oxford RobotCar Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01300/) (2019)
- [K-Radar: 4D Radar Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Various Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08171/) (2022)
- [RADIATE: A Radar Dataset for Automotive Perception in Bad Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09076/) (2020)
- [BigSSL: Exploring the Frontier of Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13226/) (2021)
- [Generative Pre-Training for Speech with Autoregressive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12607/) (2019)
- [Raw High-Definition Radar for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10646/) (2021)
- [RadarNet: Exploiting Radar for Robust Perception of Dynamic Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14366/) (2020)
- [CNN based Road User Detection using the 3D Radar Cube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12165/) (2020)
- [Learning to Detect Mobile Objects from LiDAR Scans Without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15882/) (2022)
- [CramNet: Camera-Radar Fusion with Ray-Constrained Cross-Attention for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09267/) (2022)
- [Rethinking of Radar's Role: A Camera-Radar Dataset and Systematic Annotator via Coordinate Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05207/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Temporal Relations on Radar Perception for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01184/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Unsupervised Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06357/) (2021)
- [LiRaNet: End-to-End Trajectory Prediction using Spatio-Temporal Radar Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00731/) (2020)
- [CubeLearn: End-to-end Learning for Human Motion Recognition from Raw mmWave Radar Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03976/) (2021)
- [PolarNet: Accelerated Deep Open Space Segmentation Using Automotive Radar in Polar Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03387/) (2021)

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

- [Exploring Radar Data Representations in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04861/) (2023)
- [DPFT: Dual Perspective Fusion Transformer for Camera-Radar-based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03015/) (2024)
- [SparseRadNet: Sparse Perception Neural Network on Subsampled Radar Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10600/) (2024)
- [Wavelet-based Multi-View Fusion of 4D Radar Tensor and Camera for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22972/) (2025)
- [Angle of Arrival Estimation with Transformer: A Sparse and Gridless Method with Zero-Shot Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09362/) (2024)
- [RADE-Net: Robust Attention Network for Radar-Only Object Detection in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19994/) (2026)
- [A Resource Efficient Fusion Network for Object Detection in Bird's-Eye View using Camera and Raw Radar Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13311/) (2024)
- [Enhanced 3D Object Detection via Diverse Feature Representations of 4D Radar Tensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06114/) (2025)
- [RadarXFormer: Robust Object Detection via Cross-Dimension Fusion of 4D Radar Spectra and Images for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14822/) (2026)
- [On Learning Spatial Structure from Pre-Beamforming Per-Antenna Range-Doppler Radar Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01921/) (2026)
- [RAVEN: Radar Adaptive Vision Encoders for Efficient Chirp-wise Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04490/) (2026)
- [REFNet++: Multi-Task Efficient Fusion of Camera and Radar Sensor Data in Bird's-Eye Polar View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11824/) (2026)
- [DeeperRadar: End-to-End MIMO Radar Design and Multi-Modal Fusion for Autonomous Vehicle Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17351/) (2026)
- [STAR: Scene- and Task-Aware 4D Radar Preprocessing Towards End-to-End Cognitive Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24151/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As autonomous vehicles and advanced driving assistance systems have entered wider deployment, there is an increased interest in building robust perception systems using radars. Radar-based systems are lower cost and more robust to adverse weather conditions than their LiDAR-based counterparts; however the point clouds produced are typically noisy and sparse by comparison. In order to combat these challenges, recent research has focused on consuming the raw radar data, instead of the final radar point cloud. We build on this line of work and demonstrate that by bringing elements of the signal processing pipeline into our network and then pre-training on the signal processing task, we are able to achieve state of the art detection performance on the RADIal dataset. Our method uses expensive offline signal processing algorithms to pseudo-label data and trains a network to distill this information into a fast convolutional backbone, which can then be finetuned for perception tasks. Extensive experiment results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.