VLM Distillation

VLM: Vision-Language Model

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Momentum

21 papers in the last four weeks, up 250% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 78

All topics

A General-Purpose VLM Can Teach an Astronomy Foundation Model to Better Recognize Galaxy Morphology
Aug 3, 2026Dichang Zhang, Jiaqi Deng, Yixuan Shao +7VLM Evaluation AI-Assisted Scientific Research
Department of Computer Science Stony Brook University Stony Brook, New York, USA · School of Computer Science University of Technology Sydney Sydney, New South Wales, Australia · Futurewei Technologies San Jose, California, USA
Distill What the Student Can See: Fisher-Projected On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models
Aug 2, 2026Leyan Xue, Feng Xiong, Mingjun Ma +1VLM Distillation On-Policy Distillation
College of Intelligence and Computing Tianjin University Tianjin, China
Distill What RGB Can Recover: Privileged 3D Evidence for RGB-Only Vision-Language Models
Jul 31, 2026Yanbin Hu, Jin Cui, Jun Ye +43D Spatial Reasoning VLM Distillation
School of Software, Xi’an Jiaotong University · School of Artificial Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University · State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University +1
Outcome-Guided Distillation: A Teacher-Student Framework to Advance VLM Reasoning in Autonomous Driving
Jul 31, 2026Zeyu Dong, Yimin Zhu, Yu Wu +1VLMs for Autonomous Driving End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Stony Brook University, USA · Rutgers University, USA · Sunrise Technology Inc., USA
VAD: Attributing Visual Evidence for Target Reconstruction in Multimodal On-Policy Distillation
Jul 30, 2026Kangning Zhang, Yixing Li, Shuai Shao +9Feature Attribution VLM Distillation
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Xiaohongshu Inc. · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1
Veritas++: Value-aware On-Policy Distillation for Perception-Enhanced AIGI Detection
Jul 29, 2026Hao Tan, Jun Lan, Zichang Tan +7VLM Distillation Large Vision-Language Models
School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing 101408, China, and also with the State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), Beijing 100190, China · State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), Beijing 100190, China · Ant Group +2
Self-Boosting Vision-Language Models with Noisy Student On-Policy Self-Distillation
Jul 25, 2026Shuai Wang, Daoan Zhang, Zhe Tang +2VLM Adaptation On-Policy Self-Distillation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · University of Rochester · Zhejiang University of Technology +1
Visual Saliency Steering Distillation for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Jul 24, 2026Hao Yang, Jin Wang, Xuejie ZhangVLM Distillation Multimodal QA
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming, China
Visual Contrastive Self-Distillation
Jul 23, 2026Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Yijiang Li +4On-Policy Self-Distillation VLM Distillation
University of Maryland, College Park · University of California, San Diego · Duke University +1
SOPD-SocialNav: Selective On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Social Navigation
Jul 22, 2026Xinyu Zhang, Zishuo Wang, Ling XiaoEfficient VLM Inference VLM Distillation
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
MOPDA: Mixed-Trajectory On-Policy Distillation for Language-Guided Industrial Anomaly Detection
Jul 21, 2026Shuimu Chen, Jing Jin, Nan Su +5Industrial Anomaly Detection VLM Distillation
Tsinghua University · Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ) · Shenzhen University
Answer-Conditioned Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Few-Shot Industrial Vision with Small VLMs
Jul 12, 2026Shubham RaoCoT Distillation VLM Adaptation
Entropy AI Research Labs Private Limited
CritiqueDriveVLM: From Verifier-Guided Reinforcement Learning to Latent Thought Distillation for Autonomous Driving
Jul 5, 2026Zhaohong Liu, Hao Ye, Xianlin Zhang +1VLMs for Autonomous Driving Efficient VLM Inference
State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · School of Digital Media & Design Arts
RADIO1D: Elastic Representations for Condensed Vision Modeling
Jul 3, 2026Greg Heinrich, Mike Ranzinger, Collin McCarthy +6Vision-Language Models Efficient VLM Inference
1NVIDIA
Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models What to See and Where to Look
Jul 2, 2026Yuguang Yang, Canyu Chen, Zhewen Tan +10End-to-End Autonomous Driving VLM Distillation
School of Electronic Information Engineering, Beihang University · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University · National College for Excellent Engineers, Beihang University +5
Token-level Response-visual Attention Guidance for Multimodal LLMs Knowledge Distillation
Jul 1, 2026Jaehyun Jang, Eunseop Yoon, Hee Suk Yoon +3Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation VLM Distillation
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA
H-OPD: Confidence Aware Heterogeneous Multi-Teacher Multimodal On-policy Distillation
Jul 1, 2026Qixiang Yin, Huanjin Yao, Yuchen Cai +5Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation VLM Distillation
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China · ByteDance +3
DOPD: Dual On-policy Distillation
Jun 29, 2026Xinlei Yu, Gen Li, Qingyi Si +13On-Policy Self-Distillation VLM Distillation
NUS · MMLab, CUHK · Explore Academy, JD +1
LocalNav: Distilling Frontier VLMs and Embodied RL for On-Device Object Goal Navigation
Jun 26, 2026Nicolas Baumann, Liam Boyle, Pu Deng +5Efficient VLM Inference VLM Distillation
Center for Project-Based Learning, 2Integrated Systems Laboratory, 3Computer Vision and Geometry ETH Zurich
V-Zero: Answer-Label-Free On-Policy Distillation with Contrastive Evidence Gating for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning
Jun 24, 2026Haoxiang Sun, Zhihang Yi, Langxuan Deng +6Visual Reasoning VLM Distillation
Sichuan University · Xi’an Jiaotong University · TeleAI of China Telecom +1
The Professor: Multi-Teacher Unsupervised Prompt Distillation for Vision-Language Models
Jun 22, 2026Ahmad Algadhi, Ahmed Alzuhair, Omar Alkhulaif +1VLM Distillation Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation
Department of Information and Computer Science King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
LEViL: Label-Efficient Video Learning via Zero-Shot Distillation over VLM-Generated Pseudo-Label Spaces
Jun 19, 2026Aslı ÇelikVLM Distillation Video Action Recognition
Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering Kocaeli University Kocaeli, Türkiye
Guava: Distilling Frontier VLMs into a Compact Agent through a Robotic Manipulation Harness
Jun 16, 2026Haowen Liu, Xirui Li, Shaoxiong Yao +5Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation VLM Distillation
University of Maryland College Park · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · University of Waterloo +3
Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding
Jun 16, 2026Jingyuan Huang, Zuming Huang, Yucheng Shi +4On-Policy Self-Distillation GUI Grounding
University of Georgia · 2INFLY Tech · *This work was done during an internship at INFLY Tech. +2
VL2Spike: Spike-driven Distillation from VLMs for Low-Power Visual Perception in Embodied AI
Jun 14, 2026Zinan Liu, Eric Zheng, Soumyaratna Debnath +3Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation Spiking Transformers
School of EEE, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore · Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Canada · State Key Laboratory of Extreme Photonics and Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China +1
RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation
Jun 12, 2026Xiangyu Huang, Zhenlin Hua, Han Zhou +2End-to-End Autonomous Driving Efficient VLM Inference
Carnegie Mellon University
Guided Diffusion with Distilled Vision-Language Reliability for Aerial Navigation
Jun 11, 2026Ivan Valuev, Iana Zhura, Valerii Serpiva +2Diffusion-Based Planning Robot Navigation
VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models
Jun 11, 2026Ruiqi Xian, Yuehan Xian, Jing Liang +2Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation World Model Learning
University of Maryland College Park, USA · Independent Researcher, USA · Standford University, USA +1
ViCuR: Visual Cues as Recoverable Privilege for Multimodal On-Policy Distillation
Jun 4, 2026Kanghui Tian, Siyuan Liu, Ziang Yan +3VLM Distillation Multimodal Reasoning
1Shanghai AI Laboratory · 3Nanjing University · 2Fudan University
Geometry-Aware Distillation for Prompt Tuning Biomedical Vision-Language Models
Jun 3, 2026Tran Dinh Tien, Zhiqiang ShenVLM Adaptation VLM Distillation
Department of Machine Learning Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Aug 3, 2026, cs.CVJ/K move · Enter open · S save

A General-Purpose VLM Can Teach an Astronomy Foundation Model to Better Recognize Galaxy Morphology

Dichang Zhang, Jiaqi Deng, Yixuan Shao, Yuanpeng Liu+6

Department of Computer Science Stony Brook University Stony Brook, New York, USA · School of Computer Science University of Technology Sydney Sydney, New South Wales, Australia · Futurewei Technologies San Jose, California, USA

VLM Evaluation AI-Assisted Scientific Research VLM Distillation

Open paper AskPDF arXiv

Existing astronomy foundation models provide strong galaxy representations, but adapting them to new survey conditions and survey-specific morphology recognition tasks still requires substantial human supervision. We show that VLM-based VQA systems contain meaningful visual-semantic priors that can serve as weak supervision for downstream morphology classifiers and improve morphology classification under limited human-label budgets. We first introduce a survey-oriented VQA benchmark spanning two representative imaging regimes and evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs on galaxy morphology questions. The results show that these models capture useful morphology signals and informative uncertainty, but are not sufficiently reliable to replace human annotators. Motivated by this finding, we use a general-purpose VLM as a morphology teacher for Zoobot, an astronomy foundation model pretrained on large-scale Galaxy Zoo annotations. Across two survey domains and multiple annotation budgets, the VLM teacher consistently improves Zoobot's downstream morphology classification. These results demonstrate that a general-purpose VLM provides knowledge complementary to an astronomy foundation model and can teach it to better recognize galaxy morphology under limited human supervision. The resulting pipeline is designed for label-efficient adaptation to forthcoming large-scale surveys, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The benchmark and code are publicly available at https://github.com/fw-ic/VLM-morphology-teacher.

Momentum

Related topics

Latest papers 78