# Fine-grained Image-to-LiDAR Contrastive Distillation with Visual Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14271/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06349/) (2015)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Pretraining of 3D Features on any Point-Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02691/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Pre-Training via Occlusion Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01089/) (2020)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [Spatio-temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00179/) (2021)
- [RPVNet: A Deep and Efficient Range-Point-Voxel Fusion Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12978/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)
- [Is Contrastive Distillation Enough for Learning Comprehensive 3D Representations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08973/) (2024)
- [CleverDistiller: Simple and Spatially Consistent Cross-modal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09878/) (2025)
- [Scaling Dense Event-Stream Pretraining from Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03969/) (2026)
- [Tango3D: Towards Alignment for Global and Local 2D-3D Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19727/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive image-to-LiDAR knowledge transfer, commonly used for learning 3D representations with synchronized images and point clouds, often faces a self-conflict dilemma. This issue arises as contrastive losses unintentionally dissociate features of unmatched points and pixels that share semantic labels, compromising the integrity of learned representations. To overcome this, we harness Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), which have revolutionized the acquisition of pixel-level semantics, to enhance 3D representation learning. Specifically, we utilize off-the-shelf VFMs to generate semantic labels for weakly-supervised pixel-to-point contrastive distillation. Additionally, we employ von Mises-Fisher distributions to structure the feature space, ensuring semantic embeddings within the same class remain consistent across varying inputs. Furthermore, we adapt sampling probabilities of points to address imbalances in spatial distribution and category frequency, promoting comprehensive and balanced learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach mitigates the challenges posed by traditional methods and consistently surpasses existing image-to-LiDAR contrastive distillation methods in downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/Eaphan/OLIVINE.