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This paper introduces Switch-KD, a knowledge distillation framework for VLMs that addresses inconsistent multimodal knowledge transfer by unifying vision-language knowledge transfer within a shared text-probability space. Switch-KD uses visual-switch distillation to construct cross-modal probabilistic references and a dynamic bi-directional logits difference loss to align informative probability regions. Experiments show that a 0.5B TinyLLaVA model distilled with Switch-KD from a 3B teacher achieves a 3.6 point improvement across 10 multimodal benchmarks.
Tiny VLMs can punch far above their weight: a 0.5B parameter model, guided by Switch-KD, closes the gap with its 3B teacher by 3.6 points on multimodal benchmarks.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in joint vision-language understanding, but their large scale poses significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a viable way to improve model capabilities without increasing model size or data requirements, making deployment more efficient. However, applying KD to VLMs is challenged by modality-specific supervision: although multimodal knowledge in VLMs is fused within the language space, current methods supervise each modality separately without explicitly addressing multimodal alignment, leading to inconsistent multimodal knowledge transfer. To address this, we propose Switch-KD, a visual-switch distillation framework that unifies vision-language knowledge transfer within a shared text-probability space. Switch-KD comprises two key components: (1) Visual-Switch Distillation, which switches the student's visual outputs into the teacher's language pathway to construct cross-modal probabilistic references for implicit visual knowledge transfer; and (2) Dynamic Bi-directional Logits Difference (DBiLD) loss, which adaptively aligns informative probability regions while preserving the distributional structures of teacher and student through bidirectional supervision. Guided by Switch-KD, a 0.5B TinyLLaVA effectively distills rich multimodal knowledge from its 3B teacher, yielding an average improvement of 3.6 points across 10 multimodal benchmarks without any architectural modification.
