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Creators/Authors contains: "Sun, Yihong"

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  1. Embodied agents must detect and localize objects of interest, e.g. traffic participants for self-driving cars. Supervision in the form of bounding boxes for this task is extremely expensive. As such, prior work has looked at unsupervised instance detection and segmentation, but in the absence of annotated boxes, it is unclear how pixels must be grouped into objects and which objects are of interest. This results in over-/under- segmentation and irrelevant objects. Inspired by human visual system and practical applications, we posit that the key missing cue for un- supervised detection is motion: objects of interest are typically mobile objects that frequently move and their motions can specify separate in- stances. In this paper, we propose MOD-UV, a Mobile Object Detector learned from Unlabeled Videos only. We begin with instance pseudo- labels derived from motion segmentation, but introduce a novel training paradigm to progressively discover small objects and static-but-mobile objects that are missed by motion segmentation. As a result, though only learned from unlabeled videos, MOD-UV can detect and segment mo- bile objects from a single static image. Empirically, we achieve state-of- the-art performance in unsupervised mobile object detection on Waymo Open, nuScenes, and KITTI Datasets without using any external data or supervised models. Code is available at github.com/YihongSun/MOD-UV. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 25, 2025
  2. 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. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 28, 2026
  3. Leonardis, A; Ricci, E; Roth, S; Russakovsky, O; Sattler, T; Varol, G (Ed.)
    Embodied agents must detect and localize objects of interest, e.g. traffic participants for self-driving cars. Supervision in the form of bounding boxes for this task is extremely expensive. As such, prior work has looked at unsupervised instance detection and segmentation, but in the absence of annotated boxes, it is unclear how pixels must be grouped into objects and which objects are of interest. This results in over-/under- segmentation and irrelevant objects. Inspired by human visual system and practical applications, we posit that the key missing cue for un- supervised detection is motion: objects of interest are typically mobile objects that frequently move and their motions can specify separate in- stances. In this paper, we propose MOD-UV, a Mobile Object Detector learned from Unlabeled Videos only. We begin with instance pseudo- labels derived from motion segmentation, but introduce a novel training paradigm to progressively discover small objects and static-but-mobile objects that are missed by motion segmentation. As a result, though only learned from unlabeled videos, MOD-UV can detect and segment mo- bile objects from a single static image. Empirically, we achieve state-of- the-art performance in unsupervised mobile object detection on Waymo Open, nuScenes, and KITTI Datasets without using any external data or supervised models. Code is available at github.com/YihongSun/MOD-UV. 
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  4. Unsupervised monocular depth estimation techniques have demonstrated encouraging results but typically assume that the scene is static. These techniques suffer when trained on dynamical scenes, where apparent object motion can equally be explained by hypothesizing the object's independent motion, or by altering its depth. This ambiguity causes depth estimators to predict erroneous depth for moving objects. To resolve this issue, we introduce Dynamo-Depth, an unifying approach that disambiguates dynamical motion by jointly learning monocular depth, 3D independent flow field, and motion segmentation from unlabeled monocular videos. Specifically, we offer our key insight that a good initial estimation of motion segmentation is sufficient for jointly learning depth and independent motion despite the fundamental underlying ambiguity. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on monocular depth estimation on Waymo Open and nuScenes Dataset with significant improvement in the depth of moving objects. Code and additional results are available at https://dynamo-depth.github.io. 
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  5. Unsupervised monocular depth estimation techniques have demonstrated encour- aging results but typically assume that the scene is static. These techniques suffer when trained on dynamical scenes, where apparent object motion can equally be ex- plained by hypothesizing the object’s independent motion, or by altering its depth. This ambiguity causes depth estimators to predict erroneous depth for moving objects. To resolve this issue, we introduce Dynamo-Depth, an unifying approach that disambiguates dynamical motion by jointly learning monocular depth, 3D independent flow field, and motion segmentation from unlabeled monocular videos. Specifically, we offer our key insight that a good initial estimation of motion seg- mentation is sufficient for jointly learning depth and independent motion despite the fundamental underlying ambiguity. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on monocular depth estimation on Waymo Open [34] and nuScenes [3] Dataset with significant improvement in the depth of moving objects. Code and additional results are available at https://dynamo-depth.github.io. 
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