# Geometric Foundation Model Distillation for Efficient Lunar 3D Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01851 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01851/

## 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 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [TinyViT: Fast Pretraining Distillation for Small Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10666/) (2022)
- [Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11539/) (2025)
- [CroCo: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Vision Tasks by Cross-View Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10716/) (2022)
- [Map-free Visual Relocalization: Metric Pose Relative to a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05494/) (2022)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [DUNE: Distilling a Universal Encoder from Heterogeneous 2D and 3D Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14405/) (2025)
- [GLaD: Geometric Latent Distillation for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09619/) (2025)
- [Improving Robotic Manipulation with Efficient Geometry-Aware Vision Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15880/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Intermediate-Layer Matching in Knowledge Distillation: Layer-Selection Strategy Doesn't Matter (Much)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04499/) (2025)
- [Hazard Detection And Avoidance For The Nova-C Lander](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00660/) (2022)
- [Lillama: Large Language Models Compression via Low-Rank Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16719/) (2024)
- [Distill3R: A Pipeline for Democratizing 3D Foundation Models on Commodity Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00865/) (2026)
- [Adapting Stereo Vision From Objects To 3D Lunar Surface Reconstruction with the StereoLunar Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18172/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large 3D foundation models such as MASt3R achieve state-of-the-art stereo reconstruction but are computationally demanding for deployment under strict hardware constraints -- a critical limitation in domains such as planetary exploration, where onboard computing is severely restricted. We study how far such models can be compressed through knowledge distillation, using lunar stereo reconstruction as a challenging and practically relevant case study. Starting from a 688M-parameter MASt3R teacher fine-tuned on lunar imagery, we distill its dense geometric predictions into a family of lightweight students spanning different encoder types (CNN vs ViT), decoder widths and depths, and training strategies. To bridge the dimensional mismatch between teacher and student, we propose a structured SVD-based initialization that projects the teacher's decoder weights into the student's smaller latent space, yielding a warm start that significantly improves convergence and final performance. Based on our results on lunar data, we can obtain a distilled student that retains most of teacher's reconstruction accuracy while reducing the model size up to 7 times, and even outperforms a baseline trained directly with sparse ground-truth annotations. Beyond compression, our study highlights both principles and practical insights for distilling geometric foundation models: a convolutional encoder underperforms transformer-based alternatives (though pretraining availability remains a confounding factor), preserving encoder capacity is more critical than maintaining a large decoder, feature-level distillation consistently outperforms output-only supervision, and SVD-based initialization improves optimisation stability. These findings provide practical guidelines for deploying 3D reconstruction models in resource-constrained environments.