# Multi-to-Single Knowledge Distillation for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14800 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14800/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 32 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2023.

## 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 32)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [Structured Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04197/) (2019)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [SqueezeSegV2: Improved Model Structure and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Road-Object Segmentation from a LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08495/) (2018)
- [SalsaNext: Fast, Uncertainty-aware Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03653/) (2020)
- [RPVNet: A Deep and Efficient Range-Point-Voxel Fusion Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12978/) (2021)
- [SqueezeSegV3: Spatially-Adaptive Convolution for Efficient Point-Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01803/) (2020)
- [(AF)2-S3Net: Attentive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Feature Selection for Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04530/) (2021)
- [Point-to-Voxel Knowledge Distillation for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02099/) (2022)
- [General Instance Distillation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02340/) (2021)
- [Panoptic-PolarNet: Proposal-free LiDAR Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14962/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Adaptation for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04688/) (2019)
- [AMVNet: Assertion-based Multi-View Fusion Network for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04934/) (2020)
- [4D Panoptic LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12472/) (2021)
- [3D-MiniNet: Learning a 2D Representation from Point Clouds for Fast and Efficient 3D LIDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10893/) (2020)
- [KPRNet: Improving projection-based LiDAR semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12668/) (2020)
- [Wavelet Knowledge Distillation: Towards Efficient Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06321/) (2022)
- [LatticeNet: Fast Point Cloud Segmentation Using Permutohedral Lattices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05905/) (2019)
- [TORNADO-Net: mulTiview tOtal vaRiatioN semAntic segmentation with Diamond inceptiOn module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10544/) (2020)
- [GFNet: Geometric Flow Network for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02605/) (2022)
- [A Quaternion-based Certifiably Optimal Solution to the Wahba Problem with Outliers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12536/) (2019)
- [Multi Projection Fusion for Real-time Semantic Segmentation of 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01974/) (2020)
- [MVLidarNet: Real-Time Multi-Class Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving Using Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05518/) (2020)
- [Cascaded Non-local Neural Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15488/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LIX: Implicitly Infusing Spatial Geometric Prior Knowledge into Visual Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08215/) (2024)
- [Longitudinal Risk Prediction in Mammography with Privileged History Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15814/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D point cloud semantic segmentation is one of the fundamental tasks for environmental understanding. Although significant progress has been made in recent years, the performance of classes with few examples or few points is still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-to-single knowledge distillation framework for the 3D point cloud semantic segmentation task to boost the performance of those hard classes. Instead of fusing all the points of multi-scans directly, only the instances that belong to the previously defined hard classes are fused. To effectively and sufficiently distill valuable knowledge from multi-scans, we leverage a multilevel distillation framework, i.e., feature representation distillation, logit distillation, and affinity distillation. We further develop a novel instance-aware affinity distillation algorithm for capturing high-level structural knowledge to enhance the distillation efficacy for hard classes. Finally, we conduct experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset, and the results on both the validation and test sets demonstrate that our method yields substantial improvements compared with the baseline method. The code is available at Urlhttps://github.com/skyshoumeng/M2SKD.