# Coaching a Teachable Student

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10014/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in On-policy and self-distillation for LLMs, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 68 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [On-policy and self-distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/distill/on-policy-and-self-distillation-for-llms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06711/) (2018)
- [ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03079/) (2018)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08117/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11979/) (2019)
- [Cross-view Transformers for real-time Map-view Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02833/) (2022)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15828/) (2020)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06113/) (2019)
- [DeepDriving: Learning Affordance for Direct Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00256/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Representations with Probabilistic Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10837/) (2018)
- [Cognitive Mapping and Planning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03920/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15349/) (2024)
- [Bench2Drive: Towards Multi-Ability Benchmarking of Closed-Loop End-To-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03877/) (2024)
- [DriveAdapter: Breaking the Coupling Barrier of Perception and Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00398/) (2023)
- [Recent Advancements in End-to-End Autonomous Driving using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04370/) (2023)
- [DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06659/) (2025)
- [VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14446/) (2024)
- [XVO: Generalized Visual Odometry via Cross-Modal Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16772/) (2023)
- [Autonomous Driving with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19687/) (2024)
- [Action-slot: Visual Action-centric Representations for Multi-label Atomic Activity Recognition in Traffic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17948/) (2023)
- [Learning to Drive Anywhere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12295/) (2023)
- [DriveQA: Passing the Driving Knowledge Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21824/) (2025)
- [M2DA: Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer Incorporating Driver Attention for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12552/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Interpretable End-to-End Learning via Latent Functional Modularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18947/) (2024)
- [UniLCD: Unified Local-Cloud Decision-Making via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11403/) (2024)
- [METDrive: Multi-modal End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Temporal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12667/) (2024)
- [Risk-Aware World Model Predictive Control for Generalizable End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23259/) (2026)
- [Scalable Offline Metrics for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08571/) (2025)
- [FPD-Drive: Future Policy Distillation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13232/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel knowledge distillation framework for effectively teaching a sensorimotor student agent to drive from the supervision of a privileged teacher agent. Current distillation for sensorimotor agents methods tend to result in suboptimal learned driving behavior by the student, which we hypothesize is due to inherent differences between the input, modeling capacity, and optimization processes of the two agents. We develop a novel distillation scheme that can address these limitations and close the gap between the sensorimotor agent and its privileged teacher. Our key insight is to design a student which learns to align their input features with the teacher's privileged Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. The student then can benefit from direct supervision by the teacher over the internal representation learning. To scaffold the difficult sensorimotor learning task, the student model is optimized via a student-paced coaching mechanism with various auxiliary supervision. We further propose a high-capacity imitation learned privileged agent that surpasses prior privileged agents in CARLA and ensures the student learns safe driving behavior. Our proposed sensorimotor agent results in a robust image-based behavior cloning agent in CARLA, improving over current models by over 20.6% in driving score without requiring LiDAR, historical observations, ensemble of models, on-policy data aggregation or reinforcement learning.