# GaitKD: A Universal Decoupled Distillation Framework for Efficient Gait Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26255 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26255/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 27 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03233/) (2018)
- [GaitSet: Regarding Gait as a Set for Cross-View Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06186/) (2018)
- [Cross-Image Relational Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06986/) (2022)
- [Gait Recognition in the Wild with Dense 3D Representations and A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02569/) (2022)
- [Logit Standardization in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01427/) (2024)
- [OpenGait: Revisiting Gait Recognition Toward Better Practicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06597/) (2022)
- [LidarGait: Benchmarking 3D Gait Recognition with Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10598/) (2022)
- [Deep Gait Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09546/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Gait Recognition: Algorithms, Datasets and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13732/) (2022)
- [BigGait: Learning Gait Representation You Want by Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19122/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Self-supervised Augmented Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13715/) (2021)
- [SkeletonGait: Gait Recognition Using Skeleton Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13444/) (2023)
- [Online Knowledge Distillation via Mutual Contrastive Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11518/) (2022)
- [Preparing Lessons: Improve Knowledge Distillation with Better Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07471/) (2019)
- [GaitGL: Learning Discriminative Global-Local Feature Representations for Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01380/) (2022)
- [OpenGait: A Comprehensive Benchmark Study for Gait Recognition towards Better Practicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09138/) (2024)
- [On Denoising Walking Videos for Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18582/) (2025)
- [GaitContour: Efficient Gait Recognition based on a Contour-Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16497/) (2023)
- [AdaDistill: Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01332/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AsyncCouple-Flow: Asynchronous Cross-Modal Coupling and Flow Matching for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16573/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gait recognition is an attractive biometric modality for long-range and contact-free identification, but high-performing gait models often rely on deep and computationally expensive architectures that are difficult to deploy in practice. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a natural way to transfer knowledge from a powerful teacher to an efficient student; however, standard KD is often less effective for part-structured gait models, where supervision is formed from both part-wise classification logits and part-wise retrieval embeddings. In this paper, we propose GaitKD, a distillation framework that decouples gait knowledge transfer into two complementary components: decision-level distillation and boundary-level distillation. Specifically, GaitKD aligns the teacher and student through part-calibrated logit distillation to transfer inter-class decision relations, while preserving the teacher-induced partitioning of the embedding space through an activation-boundary objective instead of direct feature regression. With a simple aligned part-wise design, GaitKD supports heterogeneous teacher-student gait models without introducing additional inference cost. Experimental results across multiple gait recognition benchmarks and teacher-student configurations show consistent improvements over strong gait baselines. Our study demonstrates that the two transfer components are complementary, and boundary-preserving distillation provides more stable performance than direct feature regression. Source code is available at https://github.com/liyiersan/GaitKD/