# SCOPE: Scene-Contextualized Incremental Few-Shot 3D Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06572 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06572/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [CLIP2Point: Transfer CLIP to Point Cloud Classification with Image-Depth Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01055/) (2022)
- [Superpoint Transformer for 3D Scene Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15766/) (2022)
- [RegionPLC: Regional Point-Language Contrastive Learning for Open-World 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00962/) (2023)
- [CLIP-FO3D: Learning Free Open-world 3D Scene Representations from 2D Dense CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04748/) (2023)
- [Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12052/) (2020)
- [Vote3Deep: Fast Object Detection in 3D Point Clouds Using Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06666/) (2016)
- [Segment3D: Learning Fine-Grained Class-Agnostic 3D Segmentation without Manual Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17232/) (2023)
- [Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05210/) (2020)
- [Point-SAM: Promptable 3D Segmentation Model for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17741/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Video Understanding: From Geometry and Semantics to Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17840/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Incremental Few-Shot (IFS) segmentation aims to learn new categories over time from only a few annotations. Although widely studied in 2D, it remains underexplored for 3D point clouds. Existing methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting or fail to learn discriminative prototypes under sparse supervision, and often overlook a key cue: novel categories frequently appear as unlabelled background in base-training scenes. We introduce SCOPE (Scene-COntextualised Prototype Enrichment), a plug-and-play background-guided prototype enrichment framework that integrates with any prototype-based 3D segmentation method. After base training, a class-agnostic segmentation model extracts high-confidence pseudo-instances from background regions to build a prototype pool. When novel classes arrive with few labelled samples, relevant background prototypes are retrieved and fused with few-shot prototypes to form enriched representations without retraining the backbone or adding parameters. Experiments on ScanNet and S3DIS show that SCOPE achieves SOTA performance, improving novel-class IoU by up to 6.98% and 3.61%, and mean IoU by 2.25% and 1.70%, respectively, while maintaining low forgetting. Code is available https://github.com/Surrey-UP-Lab/SCOPE.