# RangeViT: Towards Vision Transformers for 3D Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10222 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10222/

## Key facts

- Cited by 76 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00492/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05367/) (2023)
- [UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05573/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05258/) (2024)
- [PointOcc: Cylindrical Tri-Perspective View for Point-based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16896/) (2023)
- [FRNet: Frustum-Range Networks for Scalable LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04484/) (2023)
- [RangeLDM: Fast Realistic LiDAR Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10094/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Improving Bird's Eye View Perception Robustness in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17426/) (2024)
- [Is Your LiDAR Placement Optimized for 3D Scene Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17009/) (2024)
- [Multi-Space Alignments Towards Universal LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01538/) (2024)
- [Flow4D: Leveraging 4D Voxel Network for LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07995/) (2024)
- [Perspective-Invariant 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17665/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02286/) (2024)
- [TFNet: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Fast and Accurate LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07849/) (2023)
- [SFPNet: Sparse Focal Point Network for Semantic Segmentation on General LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11569/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of Training State-of-the-Art LiDAR Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14870/) (2024)
- [3D Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with 2D Vision-Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09826/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Accumulated Attention Map for Interpreting Evolution of Decision-Making in Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14640/) (2025)
- [Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17010/) (2024)
- [SPIRAL: Semantic-Aware Progressive LiDAR Scene Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22643/) (2025)
- [A Point-Based Approach to Efficient LiDAR Multi-Task Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12798/) (2024)
- [Label-Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with 2D-3D Vision Transformer Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03299/) (2025)
- [Rethinking LiDAR Domain Generalization: Single Source as Multiple Density Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12098/) (2023)
- [Beyond One Shot, Beyond One Perspective: Cross-View and Long-Horizon Distillation for Better LiDAR Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05260/) (2025)
- [Spherical Frustum Sparse Convolution Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17491/) (2023)
- [CurveCloudNet: Processing Point Clouds with 1D Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12050/) (2023)
- [No Thing, Nothing: Highlighting Safety-Critical Classes for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15910/) (2025)
- [NUC-Net: Non-uniform Cylindrical Partition Network for Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24634/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Vision Transformers in Autonomous Driving: Current Trends and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07542/) (2024)
- [PDF: A Probability-Driven Framework for Open World 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00979/) (2024)
- [Filling Missing Values Matters for Range Image-Based Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10175/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Casting semantic segmentation of outdoor LiDAR point clouds as a 2D problem, e.g., via range projection, is an effective and popular approach. These projection-based methods usually benefit from fast computations and, when combined with techniques which use other point cloud representations, achieve state-of-the-art results. Today, projection-based methods leverage 2D CNNs but recent advances in computer vision show that vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in many image-based benchmarks. In this work, we question if projection-based methods for 3D semantic segmentation can benefit from these latest improvements on ViTs. We answer positively but only after combining them with three key ingredients: (a) ViTs are notoriously hard to train and require a lot of training data to learn powerful representations. By preserving the same backbone architecture as for RGB images, we can exploit the knowledge from long training on large image collections that are much cheaper to acquire and annotate than point clouds. We reach our best results with pre-trained ViTs on large image datasets. (b) We compensate ViTs' lack of inductive bias by substituting a tailored convolutional stem for the classical linear embedding layer. (c) We refine pixel-wise predictions with a convolutional decoder and a skip connection from the convolutional stem to combine low-level but fine-grained features of the the convolutional stem with the high-level but coarse predictions of the ViT encoder. With these ingredients, we show that our method, called RangeViT, outperforms existing projection-based methods on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI. The code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/rangevit.