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.
The paper presents a method for distilling a large 300‑million‑parameter geospatial foundation model (Prithvi‑EO‑2.0) into a compact 0.7‑million‑parameter EfficientViT‑B0 student for flood segmentation. By using the teacher to supervise additional unlabeled Sentinel‑2 imagery, the student’s training set expands without new manual labels, achieving competitive performance on Sen1Floods11 and STURM‑Flood while remaining smaller and faster. After quantization, the student runs as a 1.5‑MB INT8 TensorRT engine on a Jetson Xavier NX, processing 512×512 images in 5.57 ms with ~14 MB of memory.
By Fabian Schmalstieg, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek
arXiv:2609.38312v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The Platonic Representation Hypothesis predicts that sufficiently scaled foundation models converge on a shared representation of the world. As each...
By Michael J. Smith, Shashwat Sourav
arXiv:2606. 00746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision foundation models are bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of self-attention, which limits usable resolution and increases the cost of large-scale pretraining.
By Yitong Jiang, Hongjun Wang, Collin McCarthy, Hanrong Ye, David Wehr, Xinhao Li, Qi Dou, Tianfan Xue, Ka Chun Cheung, Simon See, Wonmin Byeon, Ke Chen, Kai Han, Jinwei Gu, Hongxu Yin, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu
arXiv:2603. 02142v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling laws assume larger models trained on more data consistently outperform smaller ones -- an assumption that drives model selection in computer vision but remains untested in resource-constrained Earth observation (EO).
By Kwame Mbobda-Kuate, Gabriel Kasmi
PixelDense introduces a dual‑stream representation alignment for pixel diffusion, separating semantic and geometric teachers (DINOv2, SAM2, Depth Anything v2, Metric3D v2) into distinct projection spaces with an orthogonality penalty. The method improves dense‑prediction benchmarks, boosting PixelGen‑XXL’s GenEval score from 0.7927 to 0.8093, achieving significant gains in panoptic quality and depth accuracy, and accelerating training from random initialization. It also enhances SDEdit editing by preserving background structure and increasing PSNR.
By Lehan Yang, Daiqing Qi, Wenhao Zhang, Avery Li, Yiqing Yang, Yifan Li, Yu Kong, Haitian Zheng, Zhifei Zhang, Zhe Lin, Varun Jampani, Sheng Li