# UADA3D: Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection with Sparse LiDAR and Large Domain Gaps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17633/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [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)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [Exploring Categorical Regularization for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09152/) (2020)
- [Not All Points Are Equal: Learning Highly Efficient Point-based Detectors for 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11139/) (2022)
- [xMUDA: Cross-Modal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12676/) (2019)
- [Complete & Label: A Domain Adaptation Approach to Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08488/) (2020)
- [Multi-adversarial Faster-RCNN for Unrestricted Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10343/) (2019)
- [MonoDTR: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10981/) (2022)
- [SPG: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection via Semantic Point Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06709/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Detection with Multi-Level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11355/) (2021)
- [ST3D++: Denoised Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06682/) (2021)
- [LiDAR Distillation: Bridging the Beam-Induced Domain Gap for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14956/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [S3PT: Scene Semantics and Structure Guided Clustering to Boost Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23085/) (2024)
- [CleverDistiller: Simple and Spatially Consistent Cross-modal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09878/) (2025)
- [MonoCT: Overcoming Monocular 3D Detection Domain Shift with Consistent Teacher Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13743/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03858/) (2025)
- [MORDA: A Synthetic Dataset to Facilitate Adaptation of Object Detectors to Unseen Real-target Domain While Preserving Performance on Real-source Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04950/) (2025)
- [An Investigation of Beam Density on LiDAR Object Detection Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15087/) (2025)
- [Robust Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation Under Source Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01659/) (2025)
- [Domain Adaptation for Different Sensor Configurations in 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04711/) (2025)
- [BlendCLIP: Bridging Synthetic and Real Domains for Zero-Shot 3D Object Classification with Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18244/) (2025)
- [LCF3D: A Robust and Real-Time Late-Cascade Fusion Framework for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09812/) (2026)
- [Auto-Labelling-Based Domain Transfer for 3D Object Detection on a Bicycle-Mounted LiDAR Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25652/) (2026)
- [SimFuse3D: Source-Guided Target Simulation and Confidence-Guided Multi-Stage Localization Reweighting for Cross-Platform 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04886/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this study, we address a gap in existing unsupervised domain adaptation approaches on LiDAR-based 3D object detection, which have predominantly concentrated on adapting between established, high-density autonomous driving datasets. We focus on sparser point clouds, capturing scenarios from different perspectives: not just from vehicles on the road but also from mobile robots on sidewalks, which encounter significantly different environmental conditions and sensor configurations. We introduce Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection (UADA3D). UADA3D does not depend on pre-trained source models or teacher-student architectures. Instead, it uses an adversarial approach to directly learn domain-invariant features. We demonstrate its efficacy in various adaptation scenarios, showing significant improvements in both self-driving car and mobile robot domains. Our code is open-source and will be available soon.