TinyBEV: Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Multi-Task Bird's-Eye-View Perception and Planning

Reeshad Khan, John Gauch; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 4577-4585

We present TinyBEV, a unified, camera-only Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) framework that distills the full-stack capabilities of a large planning-oriented teacher (UniAD [19]) into a compact, real-time student model. Unlike prior efficient camera-only baselines such as VAD[23] and VADv2[7], TinyBEV supports the complete autonomy stack--3D detection, HD-map segmentation, motion forecasting, occupancy prediction, and goal-directed planning--within a streamlined 28M-parameter backbone, achieving a 78% reduction in parameters over UniAD [19]. Our model-agnostic, multi-stage distillation strategy combines feature-level, output-level, and adaptive region-aware supervision to effectively transfer high-capacity multi-modal knowledge to a lightweight BEV representation. On nuScenes[4], TinyBEV achieves 39.0 mAP for detection, 1.08 minADE for motion forecasting, and a 0.32 collision rate, while running 5xfaster (11 FPS) and requiring only camera input. These results demonstrate that full-stack driving intelligence can be retained in resource-constrained settings, bridging the gap between large-scale, multi-modal perception-planning models and deployment-ready real-time autonomy.