# LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 179 of its 367 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 179)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09165/) (2020)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/) (2021)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)

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

- [APCoTTA: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09971/) (2025)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Geospatial Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08375/) (2026)
- [Cross-view Domain Generalization via Geometric Consistency for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14525/) (2026)
- [Rewis3d: Reconstruction Improves Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06374/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing encompasses two major directions: data interpretation and parameter inversion. However, both directions rely heavily on costly and labor-intensive labeled data and field measurements, which constrains their scalability and spatiotemporal adaptability. Weakly Supervised Learning (WSL) provides a unified framework to address these limitations. This paper departs from the traditional view that treats interpretation and inversion as separate tasks and offers a systematic review of recent advances in LiDAR remote sensing from a unified WSL perspective. We cover typical WSL settings including incomplete supervision(e.g., sparse point labels), inexact supervision (e.g., scene-level tags), inaccurate supervision (e.g., noisy labels), and cross-domain supervision (e.g., domain adaptation/generalization) and corresponding techniques such as pseudo-labeling, consistency regularization, self-training, and label refinement, which collectively enable robust learning from limited and weak annotations.We further analyze LiDAR-specific challenges (e.g., irregular geometry, data sparsity, domain heterogeneity) that require tailored weak supervision, and examine how sparse LiDAR observations can guide joint learning with other remote-sensing data for continuous surface-parameter retrieval. Finally, we highlight future directions where WSL acts as a bridge between LiDAR and foundation models to leverage large-scale multimodal datasets and reduce labeling costs, while also enabling broader WSL-driven advances in generalization, open-world adaptation, and scalable LiDAR remote sensing.