# Channel Attention-Guided Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16806/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 11 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04745/) (2019)
- [Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/) (2016)
- [Bridging Vision and Language Encoders: Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11545/) (2023)
- [Referring Image Segmentation Using Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14575/) (2023)
- [Densely Connected Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08580/) (2025)
- [IteRPrimE: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Iterative Grad-CAM Refinement and Primary Word Emphasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00936/) (2025)
- [WeakMCN: Multi-task Collaborative Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18686/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring image segmentation (RIS) requires accurate segmentation of target regions in images according to language descriptions, which is a cross-modal task integrating vision and language. Existing RIS methods typically employ large-scale vision and language encoding models to improve performance, but their enormous parameter size severely restricts deployment in scenarios with limited computing resources. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a channel attention-guided cross-modal knowledge distillation method, which transfers the high-order fine-grained correlations between vision and language learned by the teacher network, as well as the correlations between semantic components represented by each channel, to the student network. Compared with the traditional pixel-wise relational distillation, this method not only enables the student to learn the knowledge of the teacher, but also retains part of its independent learning ability, alleviating the transfer of learning bias. Experimental results on two public datasets show that the proposed distillation method does not introduce additional parameters during inference and can achieve significant performance improvement for the student model.