3D Dense Captioning via Prototypical Momentum Distillation

3D dense captioning aims to describe the crucial regions in 3D visual scenes in the form of natural language. Recent prevailing approaches achieve promising results by leveraging complicated structures incorporated with large-scale models, which necessitate abundant parameters and pose challenges regarding its practical applications. Besides, with limited training data, 3D dense captioners are often susceptible to overfitting, directly degrading caption generation performance. Drawing inspiration from the recent advancements in knowledge distillation, we propose a novel approach termed Prototypical Momentum Distillation (PMD) to prompt the model to generate more detailed captions. PMD incorporates Momentum Distillation (MD) with an Uncertainty-aware Prototype-anchored Clustering (UPC) strategy to transfer knowledge by considering the uncertainty of the teacher knowledge. Specifically, we employ the original captioner as the student model and maintain an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) copy of the captioner as the teacher model to impart knowledge as the auxiliary supervision of the student. To abate the misleading caused by uncertain knowledge, we present an Uncertainty-aware Prototype-anchored Clustering (UPC) strategy to cluster the distilled knowledge according to its confidence. We then transfer the rearranged knowledge from the teacher to guide the training route of the student. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on two widely used benchmark datasets, ScanRefer and Nr3D. Experimental results demonstrate that PMD outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches on the benchmarks with MLE training, highlighting its effectiveness.