# OWL: Unsupervised 3D Object Detection by Occupancy Guided Warm-up and Large Model Priors Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05698 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05698/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [Occupancy-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training Large-scale LiDAR Point Clouds with Masked Occupancy Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09900/) (2022)
- [Learning to Detect Mobile Objects from LiDAR Scans Without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15882/) (2022)
- [UNION: Unsupervised 3D Object Detection using Object Appearance-based Pseudo-Classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15688/) (2024)
- [SP3D: Boosting Sparsely-Supervised 3D Object Detection via Accurate Cross-Modal Semantic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06467/) (2025)
- [HyperMODEST: Self-Supervised 3D Object Detection with Confidence Score Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14446/) (2023)
- [Seg2Box: 3D Object Detection by Point-Wise Semantics Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16811/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised 3D object detection leverages heuristic algorithms to discover potential objects, offering a promising route to reduce annotation costs in autonomous driving. Existing approaches mainly generate pseudo labels and refine them through self-training iterations. However, these pseudo-labels are often incorrect at the beginning of training, resulting in misleading the optimization process. Moreover, effectively filtering and refining them remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose OWL for unsupervised 3D object detection by occupancy guided warm-up and large-model priors reasoning. OWL first employs an Occupancy Guided Warm-up (OGW) strategy to initialize the backbone weight with spatial perception capabilities, mitigating the interference of incorrect pseudo-labels on network convergence. Furthermore, OWL introduces an Instance-Cued Reasoning (ICR) module that leverages the prior knowledge of large models to assess pseudo-label quality, enabling precise filtering and refinement. Finally, we design a Weight-adapted Self-training (WAS) strategy to dynamically re-weight pseudo-labels, improving the performance through self-training. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and KITTI demonstrate that OWL outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by over 15.0% mAP, revealing the effectiveness of our method.