# Generalized Few-Shot 3D Object Detection of LiDAR Point Cloud for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03914 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03914/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Class-balanced Grouping and Sampling for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09492/) (2019)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [Meta-Transfer Learning for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02391/) (2018)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [One Million Scenes for Autonomous Driving: ONCE Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11037/) (2021)
- [Incremental Learning of Object Detectors without Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06977/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Attention-RPN and Multi-Relation Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01998/) (2019)
- [FSCE: Few-Shot Object Detection via Contrastive Proposal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05950/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Classifier Imbalance for Long-tail Object Detection with Balanced Group Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10408/) (2020)
- [Task-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07722/) (2018)
- [LiDAR R-CNN: An Efficient and Universal 3D Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15297/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Delving into Multi-modal Multi-task Foundation Models for Road Scene Understanding: From Learning Paradigm Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02968/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Learning in Video and 3D Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17079/) (2025)
- [DGFusion: Dual-guided Fusion for Robust Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10035/) (2025)
- [CP-VoteNet: Contrastive Prototypical VoteNet for Few-Shot Point Cloud Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17036/) (2024)
- [From Dataset to Real-world: General 3D Object Detection via Generalized Cross-domain Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06282/) (2025)
- [GA-EIRFS: A Geometry-Augmented Repeat-Factor Sampling Method for Long-Tailed LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38116/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have witnessed huge successes in 3D object detection to recognize common objects for autonomous driving (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians). However, most methods rely heavily on a large amount of well-labeled training data. This limits their capability of detecting rare fine-grained objects (e.g., police cars and ambulances), which is important for special cases, such as emergency rescue, and so on. To achieve simultaneous detection for both common and rare objects, we propose a novel task, called generalized few-shot 3D object detection, where we have a large amount of training data for common (base) objects, but only a few data for rare (novel) classes. Specifically, we analyze in-depth differences between images and point clouds, and then present a practical principle for the few-shot setting in the 3D LiDAR dataset. To solve this task, we propose a simple and effective detection framework, including (1) an incremental fine-tuning method to extend existing 3D detection models to recognize both common and rare objects, and (2) a sample adaptive balance loss to alleviate the issue of long-tailed data distribution in autonomous driving scenarios. On the nuScenes dataset, we conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate that our approach can successfully detect the rare (novel) classes that contain only a few training data, while also maintaining the detection accuracy of common objects.