# Dynamic Self-adaptive Multiscale Distillation from Pre-trained Multimodal Large Model for Efficient Cross-modal Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10838 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10838/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Born Again Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04770/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [On the Efficacy of Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01348/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)

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

- [LaSER: Internalizing Explicit Reasoning into Latent Space for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01425/) (2026)
- [UP-Person: Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Text-based Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10084/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, pre-trained multimodal large models have attracted widespread attention due to their outstanding performance in various multimodal applications. Nonetheless, the extensive computational resources and vast datasets required for their training present significant hurdles for deployment in environments with limited computational resources. To address this challenge, we propose a novel dynamic self-adaptive multiscale distillation from pre-trained multimodal large model for efficient cross-modal representation learning for the first time. Unlike existing distillation methods, our strategy employs a multiscale perspective, enabling the extraction structural knowledge across from the pre-trained multimodal large model. Ensuring that the student model inherits a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the teacher knowledge. To optimize each distillation loss in a balanced and efficient manner, we propose a dynamic self-adaptive distillation loss balancer, a novel component eliminating the need for manual loss weight adjustments and dynamically balances each loss item during the distillation process. Our methodology streamlines pre-trained multimodal large models using only their output features and original image-level information, requiring minimal computational resources. This efficient approach is suited for various applications and allows the deployment of advanced multimodal technologies even in resource-limited settings. Extensive experiments has demonstrated that our method maintains high performance while significantly reducing model complexity and training costs. Moreover, our distilled student model utilizes only image-level information to achieve state-of-the-art performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks, surpassing previous methods that relied on region-level information.