# Revisiting Cross-Domain Problem for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12708 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12708/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [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)
- [A Robust Learning Approach to Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02361/) (2019)
- [ROAD: Reality Oriented Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11556/) (2017)
- [Geometry-based Distance Decomposition for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03775/) (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)
- [Few-shot Adaptive Faster R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09372/) (2019)
- [RoarNet: A Robust 3D Object Detection based on RegiOn Approximation Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03818/) (2018)

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

- [CornerPoint3D: Look at the Nearest Corner Instead of the Center](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02464/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks and transformers have been widely applied to solve 3D object detection problems in the domain of autonomous driving. While existing models have achieved outstanding performance on most open benchmarks, the generalization ability of these deep networks is still in doubt. To adapt models to other domains including different cities, countries, and weather, retraining with the target domain data is currently necessary, which hinders the wide application of autonomous driving. In this paper, we deeply analyze the cross-domain performance of the state-of-the-art models. We observe that most models will overfit the training domains and it is challenging to adapt them to other domains directly. Existing domain adaptation methods for 3D object detection problems are actually shifting the models' knowledge domain instead of improving their generalization ability. We then propose additional evaluation metrics -- the side-view and front-view AP -- to better analyze the core issues of the methods' heavy drops in accuracy levels. By using the proposed metrics and further evaluating the cross-domain performance in each dimension, we conclude that the overfitting problem happens more obviously on the front-view surface and the width dimension which usually faces the sensor and has more 3D points surrounding it. Meanwhile, our experiments indicate that the density of the point cloud data also significantly influences the models' cross-domain performance.
