Papers › Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar

Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar

26 Oct 2023CVPR 2024 1arXiv:2310.17504archive 2025-07-28

Gilles Puy, Spyros Gidaris, Alexandre Boulch, Oriane Siméoni, Corentin Sautier, Patrick Pérez, Andrei Bursuc, Renaud Marlet

Self-supervised image backbones can be used to address complex 2D tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation, object discovery) very efficiently and with little or no downstream supervision. Ideally, 3D backbones for lidar should be able to inherit these properties after distillation of these powerful 2D features. The most recent methods for image-to-lidar distillation on autonomous driving data show promising results, obtained thanks to distillation methods that keep improving. Yet, we still notice a large performance gap when measuring the quality of distilled and fully supervised features by linear probing. In this work, instead of focusing only on the distillation method, we study the effect of three pillars for distillation: the 3D backbone, the pretrained 2D backbones, and the pretraining dataset. In particular, thanks to our scalable distillation method named ScaLR, we show that scaling the 2D and 3D backbones and pretraining on diverse datasets leads to a substantial improvement of the feature quality. This allows us to significantly reduce the gap between the quality of distilled and fully-supervised 3D features, and to improve the robustness of the pretrained backbones to domain gaps and perturbations.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2310.17504")

Code

Syntology Ran 5 of 5 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 4 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: official repository: 5 samples from 1 repository, 5 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

valeoai/scalr officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

5 samples harvested; 5 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-25; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · our draft was wrong
4ran

Licence: 5 of the 5 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from valeoai/scalr. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

get_layer_id_for_waffleiron valeoai/scalr/finetune.py official repository ran fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · f1389405b7719f00 · report
load_model_config valeoai/scalr/finetune.py official repository ran licence not identified · pointer only · 8c3d171b49409c40 · report
named_apply valeoai/scalr/models/dinov2_vision_transformer.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · e7fcb6d9ac9deaf4 · report
param_groups_lrd valeoai/scalr/finetune.py official repository ran licence not identified · pointer only · 0df1faebd15a15fa · report
zero_pad valeoai/scalr/datasets/pc_dataset.py official repository ran licence not identified · pointer only · 5246673a20ebda4e · report

Tasks

Autonomous DrivingObject DiscoverySegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections