# Can Knowledge Transfer Parameters Be Learned? LePoKet for Efficient Robotic Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16637/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [On the Efficacy of Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01348/) (2019)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [Sparse Knowledge Distillation: A Mathematical Framework for Probability-Domain Temperature Scaling and Multi-Stage Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03195/) (2026)
- [How Not to Give a FLOP: Combining Regularization and Pruning for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13593/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient perception is central to robotic systems operating under constrained computation, memory, and latency budgets. Knowledge transfer from larger pretrained models offers a practical route to stronger compact perception networks, but existing approaches commonly rely on fixed distillation objectives or manually designed interaction mechanisms. Building on Hereditary Knowledge Transfer (HKT), we propose LePoKet (Learnable Parameter Optimization for Knowledge Transfer), a structural transfer framework that embeds knowledge inheritance directly into the forward computation. LePoKet introduces a block-wise Extract-Transform-Mix interface whose interaction parameters are optimized jointly with the child network through a Learnable Genetic Attention (LGA) operator, without auxiliary distillation losses or temperature scaling. We first characterize the mechanism on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 using ResNet parent-child pairs, obtaining relative error reductions of 24.57% and 25.1%, respectively, over standard child training. We then evaluate LePoKet for dense motion estimation by integrating it into a compact RAFT-based optical-flow model trained only on FlyingChairs and FlyingThings3D. LePoKet improves the compact RAFT baseline from 2.21 to 1.92 EPE on Sintel Clean, from 3.35 to 3.01 on Sintel Final, and from 7.51 to 6.39 on KITTI. A direct comparison with HKT further shows that LePoKet improves CIFAR-10 accuracy from 92.40% to 93.40% while achieving the best Sintel Final and KITTI errors among the evaluated compact transfer variants, with comparable performance on Sintel Clean. These results demonstrate that learnable structural transfer generalizes across recognition and motion perception tasks and provides a promising approach for efficient robotic vision.