arXiv Computer Vision

CLIP-RD: Relational Distillation for Efficient CLIP Knowledge Distillation

CLIP-RD introduces a relational distillation framework for efficient CLIP knowledge distillation, featuring Vertical Relational Distillation (VRD) and Cross Relational Distillation (XRD). VRD aligns intra‑modal similarity distributions between teacher and student, while XRD aligns cross‑modal similarity distributions to enforce bidirectional symmetry. This joint modeling of multidirectional relational structures improves the student’s embedding geometry, yielding a 1.8%p performance gain over CLIP‑KD across various architectures, tasks, and corruption settings with minimal training‑time overhead.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

MLLMCLIP: Feature-Level Distillation of MLLM for Robust Vision-Language Representations

MLLMCLIP introduces a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher directly into a discriminative CLIP student, eliminating the need for synthetic hard negatives. The method uses an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss to bridge architectural differences between the two models. As a result, MLLMCLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art compositional accuracy and improves zero‑shot classification and image‑text retrieval performance.

By Jongsuk Kim, Qiyu Wu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Hiromi Wakaki, Junmo Kim, Yuki Mitsufuji
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

When Better Teachers Don't Make Better Students: Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for CLIP Models in VQA

arXiv:2511.17886v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across multimodal tasks, yet their substantial computational demands hinder ef...

By Pume Tuchinda, Parinthapat Pengpun, Romrawin Chumpu, Patomporn Payoungkhamdee, Sarana Nutanong, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Too much of a good thing -- when knowledge distillation promotes overfitting, and how to avoid it

The paper investigates how knowledge distillation (KD) applied at intermediate layers of a neural network can affect overfitting and model performance. While traditional KD focuses on the final output, this study explores block‑wise KD across eleven datasets, finding that on standard datasets the last block suffices, but on fine‑grained, data‑scarce settings intermediate supervision significantly improves accuracy. The authors also analyze optimal supervision granularity using attention maps, Centered Kernel Alignment, and Grad‑CAM, and examine teacher‑student fine‑tuning strategies.

By Irene Trigueros-Lorca, Leonardo Concepci\'on, Christian Wagner, Isaac Triguero, Daniel Molina