# Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Compact and Efficient 6DoF Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 37 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2025.

## 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 37)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09457/) (2019)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Deep Ensembles: A Loss Landscape Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02757/) (2019)
- [PVNet: Pixel-wise Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11788/) (2018)
- [SSD-6D: Making RGB-based 3D detection and 6D pose estimation great again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10006/) (2017)
- [Real-Time Seamless Single Shot 6D Object Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08848/) (2017)
- [Focal and Global Knowledge Distillation for Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11837/) (2021)
- [SAM-6D: Segment Anything Model Meets Zero-Shot 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15707/) (2023)
- [Segmentation-driven 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02541/) (2018)
- [SO-Pose: Exploiting Self-Occlusion for Direct 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08367/) (2021)
- [Densely Guided Knowledge Distillation using Multiple Teacher Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08825/) (2020)
- [Show, Attend and Distill:Knowledge Distillation via Attention-based Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02973/) (2021)
- [EPro-PnP: Generalized End-to-End Probabilistic Perspective-n-Points for Monocular Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12787/) (2023)
- [ALP-KD: Attention-Based Layer Projection for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14022/) (2020)
- [Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05892/) (2023)
- [SPEED+: Next-Generation Dataset for Spacecraft Pose Estimation across Domain Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03101/) (2021)
- [Satellite Pose Estimation with Deep Landmark Regression and Nonlinear Pose Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11542/) (2019)
- [Sinkhorn Divergences for Unbalanced Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12958/) (2019)
- [CrossKD: Cross-Head Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11369/) (2023)
- [EfficientPose: An efficient, accurate and scalable end-to-end 6D multi object pose estimation approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04307/) (2020)
- [Unbalanced Optimal Transport, from Theory to Numerics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08775/) (2022)

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

- [FPG-NAS: FLOPs-Aware Gated Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Efficient 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03618/) (2025)
- [Cov2Pose: Leveraging Spatial Covariance for Direct Manifold-aware 6-DoF Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19961/) (2026)
- [Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11619/) (2026)
- [HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14684/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Object Pose Estimation with Contrastive Alignment and Pseudo-Label Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21287/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compact and efficient 6DoF object pose estimation is crucial in applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and space autonomous navigation systems, where lightweight models are critical for real-time accurate performance. This paper introduces a novel uncertainty-aware end-to-end Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework focused on keypoint-based 6DoF pose estimation. Keypoints predicted by a large teacher model exhibit varying levels of uncertainty that can be exploited within the distillation process to enhance the accuracy of the student model while ensuring its compactness. To this end, we propose a distillation strategy that aligns the student and teacher predictions by adjusting the knowledge transfer based on the uncertainty associated with each teacher keypoint prediction. Additionally, the proposed KD leverages this uncertainty-aware alignment of keypoints to transfer the knowledge at key locations of their respective feature maps. Experiments on the widely-used LINEMOD benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving superior 6DoF object pose estimation with lightweight models compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Further validation on the SPEED+ dataset for spacecraft pose estimation highlights the robustness of our approach under diverse 6DoF pose estimation scenarios.