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Main Authors: Sariyildiz, Mert Bulent, Weinzaepfel, Philippe, Lucas, Thomas, de Jorge, Pau, Larlus, Diane, Kalantidis, Yannis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14405
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author Sariyildiz, Mert Bulent
Weinzaepfel, Philippe
Lucas, Thomas
de Jorge, Pau
Larlus, Diane
Kalantidis, Yannis
author_facet Sariyildiz, Mert Bulent
Weinzaepfel, Philippe
Lucas, Thomas
de Jorge, Pau
Larlus, Diane
Kalantidis, Yannis
contents Recent multi-teacher distillation methods have unified the encoders of multiple foundation models into a single encoder, achieving competitive performance on core vision tasks like classification, segmentation, and depth estimation. This led us to ask: Could similar success be achieved when the pool of teachers also includes vision models specialized in diverse tasks across both 2D and 3D perception? In this paper, we define and investigate the problem of heterogeneous teacher distillation, or co-distillation, a challenging multi-teacher distillation scenario where teacher models vary significantly in both (a) their design objectives and (b) the data they were trained on. We explore data-sharing strategies and teacher-specific encoding, and introduce DUNE, a single encoder excelling in 2D vision, 3D understanding, and 3D human perception. Our model achieves performance comparable to that of its larger teachers, sometimes even outperforming them, on their respective tasks. Notably, DUNE surpasses MASt3R in Map-free Visual Relocalization with a much smaller encoder.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14405
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DUNE: Distilling a Universal Encoder from Heterogeneous 2D and 3D Teachers
Sariyildiz, Mert Bulent
Weinzaepfel, Philippe
Lucas, Thomas
de Jorge, Pau
Larlus, Diane
Kalantidis, Yannis
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Recent multi-teacher distillation methods have unified the encoders of multiple foundation models into a single encoder, achieving competitive performance on core vision tasks like classification, segmentation, and depth estimation. This led us to ask: Could similar success be achieved when the pool of teachers also includes vision models specialized in diverse tasks across both 2D and 3D perception? In this paper, we define and investigate the problem of heterogeneous teacher distillation, or co-distillation, a challenging multi-teacher distillation scenario where teacher models vary significantly in both (a) their design objectives and (b) the data they were trained on. We explore data-sharing strategies and teacher-specific encoding, and introduce DUNE, a single encoder excelling in 2D vision, 3D understanding, and 3D human perception. Our model achieves performance comparable to that of its larger teachers, sometimes even outperforming them, on their respective tasks. Notably, DUNE surpasses MASt3R in Map-free Visual Relocalization with a much smaller encoder.
title DUNE: Distilling a Universal Encoder from Heterogeneous 2D and 3D Teachers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14405