# Bootstrapping Autonomous Driving Radars with Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12667/) (2019)
- [Objects that Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06651/) (2017)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09001/) (2016)
- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Audio-Visual Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04237/) (2020)
- [Spatio-temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00179/) (2021)
- [DETRs with Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13080/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Guiding Audio Editing with Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21625/) (2025)
- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)
- [RLM: A Vision-Language Model Approach for Radar Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21105/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Self-Supervised Instance Contrastive Learning for Radar Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08427/) (2024)
- [Resounding Acoustic Fields with Reciprocity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20602/) (2025)
- [Random Walks in Self-supervised Learning for Triangular Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00816/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Moving Object Segmentation of Sparse and Noisy Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02395/) (2025)
- [CRISP: A Spatiotemporal Camera-Radar Backbone for Driving via Forecasting-Based World-Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04541/) (2026)
- [4D Radar Perception Algorithms for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19216/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The perception of autonomous vehicles using radars has attracted increased research interest due its ability to operate in fog and bad weather. However, training radar models is hindered by the cost and difficulty of annotating large-scale radar data. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a self-supervised learning framework to leverage the large amount of unlabeled radar data to pre-train radar-only embeddings for self-driving perception tasks. The proposed method combines radar-to-radar and radar-to-vision contrastive losses to learn a general representation from unlabeled radar heatmaps paired with their corresponding camera images. When used for downstream object detection, we demonstrate that the proposed self-supervision framework can improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art supervised baselines by 5.8% in mAP. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/yiduohao/Radical.