FD-CanKD: Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Attention Distillation as a Refinement Prior for Compact Object Detectors

Abstract: Compact object detectors are suitable for resource-constrained visual perception, but their limited representation capacity creates an accuracy gap relative to large models. Conventional detector distillation often relies on prediction-level supervision or a single feature-alignment target, such as response, distribution, correlation, or frequency-domain matching. Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Attention Knowledge Distillation (FD-CanKD) is presented as a detector-oriented framework that transfers teacher knowledge at three complementary levels: head-level prediction supervision, relation-level non-local context transfer, and frequency-level component-selective alignment. Student features first aggregate teacher-side spatial context through cross-attention-based relation transfer, after which frequency-aware alignment preserves complementary structural and detail-sensitive cues. Under controlled Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) experiments, fixed 50-epoch from-scratch comparisons show that FD-CanKD remains competitive with representative detector knowledge distillation baselines. Post-distillation continued fine-tuning further produces a stronger refinement-ready student than detector-only fine-tuning, reaching 48.87 mean average precision (mAP) at intersection-over-union thresholds from 0.50 to 0.95 (mAP50:95), 65.84 mAP50, and 53.40 mAP75 after 20 additional epochs. All distillation modules are removed after training, leaving the deployed student unchanged at 19.7M parameters. The framework is instantiated and evaluated in a controlled YOLOv12 teacher-student setting as a representative compact-detector case study.