# RPM-Distill: Physiology-guided Adaptive Cross-modal Distillation for Robust Remote Physiological Measurement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [On the Efficacy of Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01348/) (2019)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [Unifying distillation and privileged information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03643/) (2015)
- [Bilevel Optimization: Convergence Analysis and Enhanced Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07962/) (2020)
- [Cross Modal Distillation for Supervision Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00448/) (2015)
- [A Review on Bilevel Optimization: From Classical to Evolutionary Approaches and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06270/) (2017)
- [Remote Photoplethysmograph Signal Measurement from Facial Videos Using Spatio-Temporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02419/) (2019)
- [PhysFormer: Facial Video-based Physiological Measurement with Temporal Difference Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12082/) (2021)
- [RhythmNet: End-to-end Heart Rate Estimation from Face via Spatial-temporal Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11515/) (2019)
- [Modality Distillation with Multiple Stream Networks for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07110/) (2018)
- [Is Attention Better Than Matrix Decomposition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04553/) (2021)
- [The Way to my Heart is through Contrastive Learning: Remote Photoplethysmography from Unlabelled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09748/) (2021)
- [PulseGAN: Learning to generate realistic pulse waveforms in remote photoplethysmography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02699/) (2020)
- [MMPD: Multi-Domain Mobile Video Physiology Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03840/) (2023)
- [Contrast-Phys: Unsupervised Video-based Remote Physiological Measurement via Spatiotemporal Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04378/) (2022)
- [Non-Contrastive Unsupervised Learning of Physiological Signals from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07944/) (2023)
- [Learning Motion-Robust Remote Photoplethysmography through Arbitrary Resolution Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16922/) (2022)
- [Image Enhancement for Remote Photoplethysmography in a Low-Light Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09336/) (2023)
- [Align-KD: Distilling Cross-Modal Alignment Knowledge for Mobile Vision-Language Model Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01282/) (2024)
- [RhythmMamba: Fast, Lightweight, and Accurate Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06483/) (2024)
- [COSMOS: Cross-Modality Self-Distillation for Vision Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01814/) (2024)
- [FactorizePhys: Matrix Factorization for Multidimensional Attention in Remote Physiological Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01542/) (2024)
- [MoRe-Fi: Motion-robust and Fine-grained Respiration Monitoring via Deep-Learning UWB Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08195/) (2021)
- [PhysMLE: Generalizable and Priors-Inclusive Multi-task Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06201/) (2024)

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

- [Why Do VLMs Fail at Remote Physiological Measurement? Rethinking with Physiological Grounding and Numerical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19052/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video-based remote physiological measurement (RPM) is highly accessible but remains fragile under varying illumination, skin tones, and motion. Radio frequency (RF) radar is largely invariant to illumination and appearance, providing complementary cardio-respiratory micro-motion cues; however, requiring radar at inference is often impractical due to its limited ubiquity and deployment overhead. We propose RPM-Distill, a physiology-guided cross-modal distillation framework that leverages synchronized radar only during training while retaining video-only inference. Our key observation is that although RGB and RF waveforms differ in sensing physics and time-domain morphology, they share similar latent periodic rhythm in the frequency domain. We thus distill physiology-structured spectral evidence to improve robustness, via losses that (i) anchor the fundamental peak, (ii) match the off-peak background distribution, and (iii) preserve spectral morphology and sharpness. To avoid negative transfer under sample-level teacher quality and alignment uncertainty, a spectral policy network predicts sample-level distillation gates and component weights from the student--teacher spectral relation map, learned with a meta bilevel objective on a small labeled validation split. Through extensive experiments in challenging conditions and cross-dataset settings, RPM-Distill brings 81% MAE and 21% correlation improvement over unimodal baselines. Code is at https://github.com/WJULYW/RPM-Distill.