# GRAFT: Growing Agglomerative Foundation Models via Continual Teacher Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02597/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 55 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [Data Filtering Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17425/) (2023)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14643/) (2021)
- [AM-RADIO: Agglomerative Vision Foundation Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06709/) (2023)
- [SMD-Nets: Stereo Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03866/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision foundation models such as DINOv2, SigLIP2, and MASt3R develop complementary capabilities from different pretraining objectives, yet their knowledge remains distributed across separate, specialized models. Multi-teacher knowledge distillation offers a path toward consolidating these capabilities into a single agglomerative backbone, but existing approaches assume a fixed set of teachers, and incorporating a new teacher requires repeating expensive joint distillation over the entire teacher set. We introduce GRAFT, a continual multi-teacher distillation framework that enables a unified backbone to progressively acquire capabilities from an open-ended sequence of foundation models. When a new teacher arrives, GRAFT treats the previously distilled model as a teacher for preserving learned capabilities, while the current student jointly learns from both the previous model and the incoming teacher. Furthermore, to reconcile the incompatible representation geometries of heterogeneous teachers, we introduce Teacher Specific Readout Tokens, which grant each teacher an independent read-out of the shared encoder, together with Geometry Agnostic Relational Loss that aligns a vision-language teacher by matching image-text similarity structures rather than raw feature values. We provide GRAFT model, which is a single, continually extensible backbone that unifies five domains, including image understanding, 2D dense prediction, 3D human pose estimation, 3D vision, and vision-language, delivering strong performance across all of them while acquiring each new capability at the cost of a single distillation rather than a full re-distillation.