# DALI: Domain Adaptive LiDAR Object Detection via Distribution-level and Instance-level Pseudo Label Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08806/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (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)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [Mutual Mean-Teaching: Pseudo Label Refinery for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01526/) (2020)
- [Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08585/) (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)
- [CLOCs: Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00784/) (2020)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11319/) (2019)
- [FixBi: Bridging Domain Spaces for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09230/) (2020)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [SE-SSD: Self-Ensembling Single-Stage Object Detector From Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09804/) (2021)
- [SPG: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection via Semantic Point Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06709/) (2021)
- [Sparse Fuse Dense: Towards High Quality 3D Detection with Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09780/) (2022)
- [Exponential Moving Average Normalization for Self-supervised and Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08482/) (2021)
- [SIGMA: Semantic-complete Graph Matching for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06398/) (2022)
- [SimPLE: Similar Pseudo Label Exploitation for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16725/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [WILD SAM: A Simulated-and-Real Data Augmentation for Autonomous Driving Perception under Challenging Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01081/) (2026)
- [MUSDA: Multi-source Multi-modality Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10026/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Collaborative Domain Adaptation for Driving Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01818/) (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)

Object detection using LiDAR point clouds relies on a large amount of human-annotated samples when training the underlying detectors' deep neural networks. However, generating 3D bounding box annotation for a large-scale dataset could be costly and time-consuming. Alternatively, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables a given object detector to operate on a novel new data, with unlabeled training dataset, by transferring the knowledge learned from training labeled textitsource domain data to the new unlabeled textittarget domain. Pseudo label strategies, which involve training the 3D object detector using target-domain predicted bounding boxes from a pre-trained model, are commonly used in UDA. However, these pseudo labels often introduce noise, impacting performance. In this paper, we introduce the Domain Adaptive LIdar (DALI) object detection framework to address noise at both distribution and instance levels. Firstly, a post-training size normalization (PTSN) strategy is developed to mitigate bias in pseudo label size distribution by identifying an unbiased scale after network training. To address instance-level noise between pseudo labels and corresponding point clouds, two pseudo point clouds generation (PPCG) strategies, ray-constrained and constraint-free, are developed to generate pseudo point clouds for each instance, ensuring the consistency between pseudo labels and pseudo points during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the publicly available and popular datasets KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes. We show that the proposed DALI framework achieves state-of-the-art results and outperforms leading approaches on most of the domain adaptation tasks. Our code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/xiaohulugo/T-RO2024-DALIhttps://github.com/xiaohulugo/T-RO2024-DALI.