DiT-Distill: Open-Set Fine-Grained Retrieval via Generative Curriculum Knowledge

Abstract

Open-set fine-grained retrieval (OSFR) is a challenging task where models must generalize to unseen subcategories. Existing methods often fail this, as they embed category-specific semantics from closed-set training labels. Recently, diffusion transformers (DiT) have shown promise by encoding attribute-centric, generative curriculum knowledge that is agnostic to these labels. However, the vanilla DiT is not optimized for fine-grained visual discrepancies and its massive size makes deployment infeasible. To solve this, we propose DiT-Distill, a framework to first refine and then distill this knowledge. We introduce a conditional discrepancy refinement strategy to fine-tune the DiT, forcing it to focus on discrepancy-aware, attribute-centric details rather than holistic context. Subsequently, a generative curriculum distillation mechanism transfers this refined, hierarchical knowledge from multiple diffusion timesteps of the DiT into a lightweight backbone using a generative infusion module and a curriculum alignment loss. This process results in an efficient retrieval model that enables DiT-free inference. Extensive experiments show DiT-Distill achieves state-of-the-art performance on open-set fine-grained datasets.