# Better Call SAL: Towards Learning to Segment Anything in Lidar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 79 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [RF-DETR: Neural Architecture Search for Real-Time Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09554/) (2025)
- [Point-SAM: Promptable 3D Segmentation Model for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17741/) (2024)
- [P3-SAM: Native 3D Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06784/) (2025)
- [DINO in the Room: Leveraging 2D Foundation Models for 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18944/) (2025)
- [Roboflow100-VL: A Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20612/) (2025)
- [Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10226/) (2025)
- [RefAV: Towards Planning-Centric Scenario Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20981/) (2025)
- [GeoSAM2: Unleashing the Power of SAM2 for 3D Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14036/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of Training State-of-the-Art LiDAR Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14870/) (2024)
- [Shelf-Supervised Cross-Modal Pre-Training for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10115/) (2024)
- [CREStE: Scalable Mapless Navigation with Internet Scale Priors and Counterfactual Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03921/) (2025)
- [LogoSP: Local-global Grouping of Superpoints for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07857/) (2025)
- [Towards Learning to Complete Anything in Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12264/) (2025)
- [SP3D: Boosting Sparsely-Supervised 3D Object Detection via Accurate Cross-Modal Semantic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06467/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot 4D Lidar Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00848/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving Perception: A Survey Through Core Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08302/) (2025)
- [OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23502/) (2026)
- [LOSC: LiDAR Open-voc Segmentation Consolidator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07605/) (2025)
- [GASP: Unifying Geometric and Semantic Self-Supervised Pre-training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15672/) (2025)
- [LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/) (2025)
- [SALT: A Flexible Semi-Automatic Labeling Tool for General LiDAR Point Clouds with Cross-Scene Adaptability and 4D Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23980/) (2025)
- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)
- [SAM4D: Segment Anything in Camera and LiDAR Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21547/) (2025)
- [ShelfGaussian: Shelf-Supervised Open-Vocabulary Gaussian-based 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03370/) (2025)
- [Improving Multimodal Distillation for 3D Semantic Segmentation under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17455/) (2025)
- [DetPO: In-Context Learning with Multi-Modal LLMs for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23455/) (2026)
- [Label-Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02372/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Efficient CLIP Adaptation for 3D Understanding via Unified Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18819/) (2025)
- [ALISE: Annotation-Free LiDAR Instance Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05752/) (2025)
- [UniLiPs: Unified LiDAR Pseudo-Labeling with Geometry-Grounded Dynamic Scene Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05105/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose the SAL (Segment Anything in Lidar) method consisting of a text-promptable zero-shot model for segmenting and classifying any object in Lidar, and a pseudo-labeling engine that facilitates model training without manual supervision. While the established paradigm for Lidar Panoptic Segmentation (LPS) relies on manual supervision for a handful of object classes defined a priori, we utilize 2D vision foundation models to generate 3D supervision ``for free''. Our pseudo-labels consist of instance masks and corresponding CLIP tokens, which we lift to Lidar using calibrated multi-modal data. By training our model on these labels, we distill the 2D foundation models into our Lidar SAL model. Even without manual labels, our model achieves 91% in terms of class-agnostic segmentation and 54% in terms of zero-shot Lidar Panoptic Segmentation of the fully supervised state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we outperform several baselines that do not distill but only lift image features to 3D. More importantly, we demonstrate that SAL supports arbitrary class prompts, can be easily extended to new datasets, and shows significant potential to improve with increasing amounts of self-labeled data. Code and models are available at this hrefhttps://github.com/nv-dvl/segment-anything-lidarURL.