# All Points Matter: Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment for Weakly-supervised 3D Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Endora: Video Generation Models as Endoscopy Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11050/) (2024)
- [Optical Flow Representation Alignment Mamba Diffusion Model for Medical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01647/) (2024)
- [When 3D Partial Points Meets SAM: Tooth Point Cloud Segmentation with Sparse Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01691/) (2024)
- [Collect-and-Distribute Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01257/) (2023)
- [On Geometry-Enhanced Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for 3D Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22444/) (2025)
- [Exploring Scene Affinity for Semi-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11280/) (2024)
- [Distribution Guidance Network for Weakly Supervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08091/) (2024)
- [CitySeg: A 3D Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Foundation Model in City-scale Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09470/) (2025)
- [Towards Modality-agnostic Label-efficient Segmentation with Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16520/) (2024)
- [High-quality Pseudo-labeling for Point Cloud Segmentation with Scene-level Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23227/) (2025)
- [ADHAM: Additive Deep Hazard Analysis Mixtures for Interpretable Survival Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07108/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds via Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation-based Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11007/) (2026)
- [Semantic Segmentation for Histopathology using Learned Regularization based on Global Proportions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24347/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pseudo-labels are widely employed in weakly supervised 3D segmentation tasks where only sparse ground-truth labels are available for learning. Existing methods often rely on empirical label selection strategies, such as confidence thresholding, to generate beneficial pseudo-labels for model training. This approach may, however, hinder the comprehensive exploitation of unlabeled data points. We hypothesize that this selective usage arises from the noise in pseudo-labels generated on unlabeled data. The noise in pseudo-labels may result in significant discrepancies between pseudo-labels and model predictions, thus confusing and affecting the model training greatly. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning strategy to regularize the generated pseudo-labels and effectively narrow the gaps between pseudo-labels and model predictions. More specifically, our method introduces an Entropy Regularization loss and a Distribution Alignment loss for weakly supervised learning in 3D segmentation tasks, resulting in an ERDA learning strategy. Interestingly, by using KL distance to formulate the distribution alignment loss, it reduces to a deceptively simple cross-entropy-based loss which optimizes both the pseudo-label generation network and the 3D segmentation network simultaneously. Despite the simplicity, our method promisingly improves the performance. We validate the effectiveness through extensive experiments on various baselines and large-scale datasets. Results show that ERDA effectively enables the effective usage of all unlabeled data points for learning and achieves state-of-the-art performance under different settings. Remarkably, our method can outperform fully-supervised baselines using only 1% of true annotations. Code and model will be made publicly available at https://github.com/LiyaoTang/ERDA.