# IDEAL-M3D: Instance Diversity-Enriched Active Learning for Monocular 3D Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [3D Bounding Box Estimation Using Deep Learning and Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00496/) (2016)
- [DAIR-V2X: A Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05575/) (2022)
- [Disentangling Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12365/) (2019)
- [Objects are Different: Flexible Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02323/) (2021)
- [Geometry Uncertainty Projection Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13774/) (2021)
- [Delving into Localization Errors for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16237/) (2021)
- [Contextual Diversity for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05723/) (2020)
- [RepViT: Revisiting Mobile CNN From ViT Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09283/) (2023)
- [V2X-Seq: A Large-Scale Sequential Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05938/) (2023)
- [Recent Advancements in End-to-End Autonomous Driving using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04370/) (2023)
- [MobileNetV4 -- Universal Models for the Mobile Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10518/) (2024)
- [Discriminative Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06347/) (2019)
- [ViewAL: Active Learning with Viewpoint Entropy for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11789/) (2019)
- [A Comparative Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13450/) (2022)
- [MonoDETR: Depth-guided Transformer for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13310/) (2022)
- [Rope3D: TheRoadside Perception Dataset for Autonomous Driving and Monocular 3D Object Detection Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13608/) (2022)
- [Multiple instance active learning for object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02324/) (2021)
- [Learning Auxiliary Monocular Contexts Helps Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04628/) (2021)

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

- [LeAD-M3D: Leveraging Asymmetric Distillation for Real-Time Monocular 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05663/) (2025)
- [MAGneT-3D: Monocular and Domain-Generalizable Temporal 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14282/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular 3D detection relies on just a single camera and is therefore easy to deploy. Yet, achieving reliable 3D understanding from monocular images requires substantial annotation, and 3D labels are especially costly. To maximize performance under constrained labeling budgets, it is essential to prioritize annotating samples expected to deliver the largest performance gains. This prioritization is the focus of active learning. Curiously, we observed two significant limitations in active learning algorithms for 3D monocular object detection. First, previous approaches select entire images, which is inefficient, as non-informative instances contained in the same image also need to be labeled. Secondly, existing methods rely on uncertainty-based selection, which in monocular 3D object detection creates a bias toward depth ambiguity. Consequently, distant objects are selected, while nearby objects are overlooked. To address these limitations, we propose IDEAL-M3D, the first instance-level pipeline for monocular 3D detection. For the first time, we demonstrate that an explicitly diverse, fast-to-train ensemble improves diversity-driven active learning for monocular 3D. We induce diversity with heterogeneous backbones and task-agnostic features, loss weight perturbation, and time-dependent bagging. IDEAL-M3D shows superior performance and significant resource savings: with just 60% of the annotations, we achieve similar or better AP3D on KITTI validation and test set results compared to training the same detector on the whole dataset.