# Exploring Scene Affinity for Semi-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11280 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11280/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [SqueezeSegV2: Improved Model Structure and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Road-Object Segmentation from a LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08495/) (2018)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [Panoptic nuScenes: A Large-Scale Benchmark for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03805/) (2021)
- [(AF)2-S3Net: Attentive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Feature Selection for Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04530/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05367/) (2023)
- [Mix3D: Out-of-Context Data Augmentation for 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02210/) (2021)
- [Spherical Transformer for LiDAR-based 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12766/) (2023)
- [LaserMix for Semi-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00026/) (2022)
- [Guided Point Contrastive Learning for Semi-supervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08188/) (2021)
- [PolarMix: A General Data Augmentation Technique for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00223/) (2022)
- [Scribble-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08537/) (2022)
- [Regularization Strategy for Point Cloud via Rigidly Mixed Sample](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01929/) (2021)
- [Multi-Modal Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05258/) (2024)
- [FIDNet: LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Fully Interpolation Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03787/) (2021)
- [Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17504/) (2023)
- [SSDA3D: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02845/) (2022)
- [Less is More: Reducing Task and Model Complexity for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11203/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Collaborative Learning for Semi-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17135/) (2026)
- [RePL: Pseudo-label Refinement for Semi-supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores scene affinity (AIScene), namely intra-scene consistency and inter-scene correlation, for semi-supervised LiDAR semantic segmentation in driving scenes. Adopting teacher-student training, AIScene employs a teacher network to generate pseudo-labeled scenes from unlabeled data, which then supervise the student network's learning. Unlike most methods that include all points in pseudo-labeled scenes for forward propagation but only pseudo-labeled points for backpropagation, AIScene removes points without pseudo-labels, ensuring consistency in both forward and backward propagation within the scene. This simple point erasure strategy effectively prevents unsupervised, semantically ambiguous points (excluded in backpropagation) from affecting the learning of pseudo-labeled points. Moreover, AIScene incorporates patch-based data augmentation, mixing multiple scenes at both scene and instance levels. Compared to existing augmentation techniques that typically perform scene-level mixing between two scenes, our method enhances the semantic diversity of labeled (or pseudo-labeled) scenes, thereby improving the semi-supervised performance of segmentation models. Experiments show that AIScene outperforms previous methods on two popular benchmarks across four settings, achieving notable improvements of 1.9% and 2.1% in the most challenging 1% labeled data.