Grid-Preserving Knowledge Distillation: Transferring Convolutional Inductive Bias to Vision Transformers under Data Scarcity
Vision Transformers demonstrate remarkable global modeling capacity but often underperform in data-scarce regimes. Distilling convolutional inductive biases from a CNN teacher provides an effective remedy while leaving the deployed model unchanged. However, general-purpose feature distillation transfers little in this setting. In CNN-to-CNN distillation, pooling, flattening, and logit-space projections remove the spatial grid that encodes locality and translation equivariance. Unlike a convolutional student, a ViT cannot readily reconstruct this structure on its own. In this paper, we propose iBKD, a distillation framework that preserves the spatial grid throughout the entire transfer pro...
| Authors | Junyong Choi, Cheolhyeon Park, Jaehoon Cho |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 11 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.