arXiv Computation and Language

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

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 AI
Jun 2

Visual-Noise Guided In-Context Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Model Unlearning

arXiv:2606. 00105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on vision-language tasks, but they may also memorize and expose sensitive or restricted knowledge, raising concerns about privacy and broader safety risks.

By Junkai Chen, Yuhao He, Junxiang You, Ruiqi Liu, Chenyu Wang, Shu Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Model Adaptation, an Effective Paradigm on Low-Quality Multimodal Data

arXiv:2609.10321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation offers an efficient route to transfer a task-adapted vision-language teacher to a compact student. The training target in curren...

By Hongyuan Zhang, Xianda Guo, Yanlun Peng, Qianlong Yang, Yubin Guo, Pinhan Fu, Mulin Chen, Xiaozhen Qiao, Ping Luo
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

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.

By Jeannie Chung, Hanna Jang, Ingyeong Yang, Uiwon Hwang, Jaehyeong Sim