An official website of the United States government
Self-driving cars must detect other traffic partici- pants like vehicles and pedestrians in 3D in order to plan safe routes and avoid collisions. State-of-the-art 3D object detectors, based on deep learning, have shown promising accuracy but are prone to over-fit domain idiosyncrasies, making them fail in new environments—a serious problem for the robustness of self-driving cars. In this paper, we propose a novel learning approach that reduces this gap by fine-tuning the detector on high-quality pseudo-labels in the target domain – pseudo- labels that are automatically generated after driving based on replays of previously recorded driving sequences. In these replays, object tracks are smoothed forward and backward in time, and detections are interpolated and extrapolated— crucially, leveraging future information to catch hard cases such as missed detections due to occlusions or far ranges. We show, across five autonomous driving datasets, that fine-tuning the object detector on these pseudo-labels substantially reduces the domain gap to new driving environments, yielding strong improvements detection reliability and accuracy.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on April 28, 2026
Learning 3D Perception from Others' Predictions
Accurate 3D object detection in real-world environments requires a huge amount of annotated data with high quality. Acquiring such data is tedious and expensive, and often needs repeated effort when a new sensor is adopted or when the detector is deployed in a new environment. We investigate a new scenario to construct 3D object detectors: learning from the predictions of a nearby unit that is equipped with an accurate detector. For example, when a self-driving car enters a new area, it may learn from other traffic participants whose detectors have been optimized for that area. This setting is label-efficient, sensor-agnostic, and communication-efficient: nearby units only need to share the predictions with the ego agent (e.g., car). Naively using the received predictions as ground-truths to train the detector for the ego car, however, leads to inferior performance. We systematically study the problem and identify viewpoint mismatches and mislocalization (due to synchronization and GPS errors) as the main causes, which unavoidably result in false positives, false negatives, and inaccurate pseudo labels. We propose a distance-based curriculum, first learning from closer units with similar viewpoints and subsequently improving the quality of other units' predictions via self-training. We further demonstrate that an effective pseudo label refinement module can be trained with a handful of annotated data, largely reducing the data quantity necessary to train an object detector. We validate our approach on the recently released real-world collaborative driving dataset, using reference cars' predictions as pseudo labels for the ego car. Extensive experiments including several scenarios (e.g., different sensors, detectors, and domains) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach toward label-efficient learning of 3D perception from other units' predictions.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2107077
- PAR ID:
- 10639176
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Conference on Learning Representations
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, Singapore
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
For a self-driving car to operate reliably, its perceptual system must generalize to the end-user's environment---ideally without additional annotation efforts. One potential solution is to leverage unlabeled data (eg, unlabeled LiDAR point clouds) collected from the end-users' environments (ie target domain) to adapt the system to the difference between training and testing environments. While extensive research has been done on such an unsupervised domain adaptation problem, one fundamental problem lingers: there is no reliable signal in the target domain to supervise the adaptation process. To overcome this issue we observe that it is easy to collect unsupervised data from multiple traversals of repeated routes. While different from conventional unsupervised domain adaptation, this assumption is extremely realistic since many drivers share the same roads. We show that this simple additional assumption is sufficient to obtain a potent signal that allows us to perform iterative self-training of 3D object detectors on the target domain. Concretely, we generate pseudo-labels with the out-of-domain detector but reduce false positives by removing detections of supposedly mobile objects that are persistent across traversals. Further, we reduce false negatives by encouraging predictions in regions that are not persistent. We experiment with our approach on two large-scale driving datasets and show remarkable improvement in 3D object detection of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, bringing us a step closer to generalizable autonomous driving.more » « less
-
Current 3D object detectors for autonomous driving are almost entirely trained on human-annotated data. Although of high quality, the generation of such data is laborious and costly, restricting them to a few specific locations and object types. This paper proposes an alternative approach entirely based on unlabeled data, which can be collected cheaply and in abundance almost everywhere on earth. Our ap- proach leverages several simple common sense heuristics to create an initial set of approximate seed labels. For ex- ample, relevant traffic participants are generally not per- sistent across multiple traversals of the same route, do not fly, and are never under ground. We demonstrate that these seed labels are highly effective to bootstrap a surpris- ingly accurate detector through repeated self-training with- out a single human annotated label. Code is available at https:// github.com/ YurongYou/ MODEST .more » « less
-
Current 3D object detectors for autonomous driving are almost entirely trained on human-annotated data. Although of high quality, the generation of such data is laborious and costly, restricting them to a few specific locations and object types. This paper proposes an alternative approach entirely based on unlabeled data, which can be collected cheaply and in abundance almost everywhere on earth. Our approach leverages several simple common sense heuristics to create an initial set of approximate seed labels. For example, relevant traffic participants are generally not persistent across multiple traversals of the same route, do not fly, and are never under ground. We demonstrate that these seed labels are highly effective to bootstrap a surprisingly accurate detector through repeated self-training without a single human annotated label. Code is available at https://github.com/YurongYou/MODEST.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)3D object detection is an important yet demanding task that heavily relies on difficult to obtain 3D annotations. To reduce the required amount of supervision, we propose 3DIoUMatch, a novel semi-supervised method for 3D object detection applicable to both indoor and outdoor scenes. We leverage a teacher-student mutual learning framework to propagate information from the labeled to the unlabeled train set in the form of pseudo-labels. However, due to the high task complexity, we observe that the pseudo-labels suffer from significant noise and are thus not directly usable. To that end, we introduce a confidence-based filtering mechanism, inspired by FixMatch. We set confidence thresholds based upon the predicted objectness and class probability to filter low-quality pseudo-labels. While effective, we observe that these two measures do not sufficiently capture localization quality. We therefore propose to use the estimated 3D IoU as a localization metric and set category-aware self-adjusted thresholds to filter poorly localized proposals. We adopt VoteNet as our backbone detector on indoor datasets while we use PV-RCNN on the autonomous driving dataset, KITTI. Our method consistently improves state-of-the-art methods on both ScanNet and SUN-RGBD benchmarks by significant margins under all label ratios (including fully labeled setting). For example, when training using only 10% labeled data on ScanNet, 3DIoUMatch achieves 7.7 absolute improvement on mAP@0.25 and 8.5 absolute improvement on mAP@0.5 upon the prior art. On KITTI, we are the first to demonstrate semi-supervised 3D object detection and our method surpasses a fully supervised baseline from 1.8% to 7.6% under different label ratio and categories.more » « less
